Cultivated Plants

Excerpt from Cultivated Plants: Their Propagation and Improvement The late Dr Lindley, when preparing the preface for his father's 'Guide to the Orchard' wrote the following: "There are two great considerations to which it is above all things necessary that the attention of the cultivator should be directed - namely, Amelioration and Propagation." And with this object in view the present handbook has been prepared. Plant-propagation is one of the most important branches of cultivation as practised in our gardens; and especially is this so in the case of hybridism and cross-breeding, on the scientific aspects of which so much has been written to the purpose in our time. In this work the practical side of the question has been chosen, since there here seemed a comparatively open field for a work of this kind, which, apart from its primary use as a popular handbook on plant propagation and improvement, might also serve young gardeners as a stepping-stone to works of...