al colleges. Of
late years, too, scores of young men in all parts of the country have
been apprenticing themselves to the large establishments near the
cities, and already some of these have achieved a high standing; for
the training so received by a lad from sixteen to twenty, better
fits him for the business here than ten years of European experience,
because much of what is learned there would prove worse than
useless here. The English or German florist has here to contend with
unfamiliar conditions of climate and a manner of doing business that
is novel to him. Again he has been trained to more deliberate methods
of working, and when I told the story a few years ago of a workman who
had potted 10,000 cuttings in two inch pots in ten consecutive hours,
it was stigmatized in nearly every horticultural magazine in Europe
as a piece of American bragging. As a matter of fact this same workman
two years later, potted 11,500 plants in ten hours, and since then
several other workmen have potted plants at the rate of a thousand per
hour all day long.

Old world conservatism is slow to adopt improvements. The practice
of heating by low pressure steam will save in labor, coal and
construction one-fifth of the expense by old methods, and nearly all
the large green-house establishments in this country, whether private
or commercial, have been for some years furnished with the best
apparatus. But when visiting London, Edinburgh and Paris in 1885, I
neither saw nor heard of a single case where steam had been used for
green-house heating. The stress of competition here has developed
enterprise, encouraged invention and driven us to rapid and prudent
practice, so that while labor costs at least twice as much as it does
in Europe, our prices both at wholesale and retail, are lower. And
yet I am not aware that American florists complain that their profits
compare unfavorably with those of their brethren over the sea.

Commercial floriculture includes two distinct branches, one for the
production of flowers and the other for the production of plants.
During the past twenty years the growth in the flower department of
the business has outstripped the growth of the plant department. The
increase in the sale of Rosebuds in winter is especially noteworthy.
At the present time it is safe to say that one-third of the entire
glass structures in the United States are used for this purpose; many
large growers having from two to three acres in