The suburban citizen., 1901-10-12
clEIs OF TIE GARDENER.
Miraculous Changes Wrought by Patien
HorticuIturiata.

Miraculous Changes Wrought by Patient
HorticuIturiata.
A large ugly plant, with straggly,
pale-green leaves, grows here and
there along the coast of England.
1t is nearly two feet high, has a
tough, woody stem and yellow flowers,
which tgrn to pods filed with seed.
No one looking at it would give It a
second thought, or consider 1t any
thing but a useless weed, says Tit
Bits. Yet that weed is the ancestor,
in a direct line, Of the plump cabbage,
the tender Brussels sprout, and even
Of the dainty caulihower. All this
seemingly miraculous change has been
wrought by the hand OF the patient
gardener toiling from generation to
generation, and always improving
upon the original stock, till nature
herself would hardly recognize her
offspring
The gardener has done more for the
world than the inventor, or even the
shepherd. If It were not that we have
grain to make bread we should still be
scanty tribes Of blue-stained savages,
fighting the beasts for life. For man
must have food, and If he did not grow
it in his field or garden he would be
forced, like our far-back ancestors, to
go out into the forest and kill the ami
mails to supply it.
Wheat was once mere wild grass,
but 1t is so long since gardeners took
it in hand that its origin as n food
plant Is lost in the mists of antiquity
Bat within the last three centuries
cultivators Of the soil have worked a
bigger miracle than turning grass to
bread. Wheat is now no longer the
worlds biggest crop. 1t has been beat
en by a weed Spanish explorers found
near Quito, in the Andes, about the
year 1920, and which was brought to
England from Virginia in 1868.
The earth's annual potato crop is now
four billions Of bushels, wheat produc-
ing two and a half billions only, and
maize about the same amount II was
the gardener who turned those little
watery, bullet-shaped roots to the
great tubers Of white elephants and
"magnum bonums."
A little plant, with glossy, green
leaves and a threadlike, reddish root,
grows on the shores Of the Mediterra-
moan. Gardeners took it in hand, and
the result Is that the price of sugar has
fallen from fivepence to twopence a
pound and Europe, instead of import
ing all her sugar from the tropics,
makes for herself two and three-quar-
ter million tons a year from the root
of the sugar beet.
The gardener does more than i'm
prove plants in size and color. He
makes new ones. There are, for in
stance, nearly sixty varieties of Or
ange, varying from the giant seedless
Bahia to the delicate little kld-gloye,
or Tangerine. There is also the i'm
mense Pomelo, which is a cross be-
tween an orange and a lemon Other
fruit growers have succeeded in cross
ing the blackberry and raspberry and
producing a new delicacy, twice as
large and succulent as either Of the
older fruits.
AS for apples, there are said to be
800 named varieties, and the gardener
Las evolved them all from the sour lit
to hedgerow crab. In similar fashion
he has changed the little black sloes
which grow on the blackthorn to glo-
rious great purple and yellow piums.
Perhaps 1t is in flowers that the
amazing achievements of gardeners
are most striking. Who could imagine
that the massive, fragrant Gloire de
Dijou was once the single-petaled al
most scentless dog rose, or that the
tiny heartsease OF the wheat fields
could have been changed to the impe-
rial purple pansy, with a blossom
three inches across? 1t is an almost
bigger miracle that has turned the
common herb Robert and cranes bin
of our fields to blazing geraniums and
gorgeous pelargonlums.
Farmers Of to-day have a choice of
thirty or more different grass seeds to
sow for pasture or hay. All these tame
grasses have been evolved from wild
ones by the experimental gardener
within the last 130 years. The result
is that millions Of acres, once consid-
cred useless, have now been brought
into cultivation, and that the percent
age Of titled ground in Europe has
grown in a century from less than two
acres in the hundred to nearly three
tines that amount.