Horticulture, in its best estate, is one of the factors in the evolution of a noble and refined social order. Not without bitter knowledge of the temptations of cities and politics, the wise Lord of Verulam wrote : "Men come to build stately, sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were the greater perfection." And so it is, perhaps, a matter of worldwide importance when a garden-loving people begin to develop new features of this ancient art, under peculiarly favorable conditions of soil and climate. The horticulturist has found but one California on the continent. No one, except the individual concerned, cares at all whether or not there is money in this thing; but every thoughtful person cares greatly whether or not a very Italy for beauty, a land of new and exquisite garden surprises, is being created in the hidden vales, and on the mountain sides of Coast Range and Sierra. It may happen that, a hundred years hence, lessons for the healing of the nations will come from the associated horticultural enterprises now in their infancy on the Pacific Coast. At least, I am sure, the potential garden-art of California works towards higher ends than the pleasure and profit of the gardeners themselves.

From homes in such rose-gardens as the world has never yet seen, American colleges may yet gather their best students. In the colony farm-gardens by the hundred and thousand, educated men and women may yet live by intensive horticulture, and slowly infuse higher ideals into the organization of the state. Perhaps the full development of California horticulture will some day take the sceptre of political power from the cities and place it forever in the hands of educated suburban communities, trained in the rights and duties of local self-government.

Twenty years ago the tendency of things in California was to destroy the small farmer, the small fruit-grower, the ten-acre colonist, the gardener, and the garden. Vast empires were being conquered by capitalists, stolen from the Government, seized from the herdsmen and miner, watered by river like canals, sown to wheat and alfalfa. One heard of plans for orchards of ten thousand acres, vineyards to cover whole valleys. Slowly the high cost of labor here, and all the disintegrating influences that oppose a landed aristocracy, began to destroy the fabric. The profits of the large rancher lessened : the profits of the horticulturist increased: the small homestead set in the midst of a garden is becoming the Cali-fornian ideal. For this the whole country, a wilderness of fertile hills, a land like a vaster Palestine, is thoroughly adapted, and can in no other way fulfill its destiny. The value for the present year of the purely horticultural products, fruits, wines, vegetables, flowers, in the state of California, will be, it is estimated, something like thirty-six million dollars.

The growth of the cereals is still the greatest industry of California, but horticulture comes next, and in ten years more will undoubtedly outrank all other pursuits.

Mining, manufactures, general farming, commerce, are all to be but the hand-maidens of horticulture in California. Here, then, if the present promise is broadly fulfilled, a commonwealth is to develop differing in vital respects from the other American commonwealths. What a pregnant fact it is that in the single county of Fresno (fifteen years ago a sheep-range county), four thousand eight hundred acres of new orchards and gardens were planted last winter by about five hundred different colonists.

In the state at large, about four million trees were planted last winter. Nurserymen tell me, also, that about two hundred and fifty thousand rose-bushes were planted, chiefly in the coast counties. Such large importations of plants from Japan and the Orient were never before made. The enormous commercial demands of horticultural communities begin to display themselves. To plant one hundred thousand acres in trees requires ten million plants, grown at least two years in nurseries ; it requires at (east one hundred million vines to plant the same area. And, some day all the best part of California will be devoted to horticulture.

I look out of my window. ,The sweet pea hedge, sown before Christmas, is eight feet high and six feet wide, a mass of bloom from the ground to the topmost spray, and has been so since May. The rose bushes are loaded with flowers, the pansy bed is in its prime, the nasturtiums, from seed sown in the open ground, are higher than the tops of the cottage windows, and have been blooming since February. Ten-cent rose plants sent me by mail last December, are bearing several flowers apiece, and stand a foot high or more. Down the street I can see a two-story cottage whose front is entirely covered by a rose-vine which has been budded to eight or ten choice varieties; they are all in bloom now, and have been so for a month. There are large houses here that are covered from basement to roof with Mar6chal Niels, La Marques, Banksias, Climbing Devoniensis, Reve d'Or, and other famous roses. In my own little garden, which in September, 1888, was a piece of pasture, with only weeds and grass upon it, I gathered flowers from my Mar6chal Niel rose on Thanksgiving Day, and it has been in continuous bloom ever since.

Last summer about twenty rose-fairs, and other horticultural shows, were attractions in various parts of the state. We have not yet come to that stage of the art which demands differentiation of our material. After awhile California will have daffodil shows in February, hyacinth shows in March, and pansy shows in April, as well as rose shows in May; in fact, we shall have flower shows every month in the year, and ultimately, perhaps, a perpetual flower society exhibition. A successful horticultural magazine and a dozen or more weeklies devoted to branches of horticulture are supported in California. The gardens which I wish to describe are using in the fullest manner the possibilities of soil and climate here. Perpetual growth and bloom abide in a typical California garden ; the trees and shrubs need very little water, except the natural rainfall; the spring bulbs and early flowers need no artificial supply. The secrets of gardening here are constant tillage, early planting, and the keeping plants from going to seed too early. The roses, for instance, are cut back after each period of bloom, and then new shoots start at once. Daffodils, and many other spring bulbs become naturalized, and are left in the ground to take care of themselves, just as the wild flowers do.

The fortunate tendency of gardening art here is to produce a very extensive naturalization of beautiful plants from all over the world. Eventually, many of these plants will escape from gardens into the fields, ravines, and woods, and gradually add most interesting elements to the Cali-fornian landscape. In Ventura, I know of a ravine where the trimmings of rose-bushes have many of. them rooted, being carried down by the rains from a garden above, and are now running wild over the bushes. In Nevada county I have seen the most delicate and lovely garden annuals, self-seeding, and permanently established in the forest. In Alameda county it is now proposed by some garden-lovers to sow many pounds of nasturtium seeds in the warmer canons, there to take care of themselves, as they certainly will.

That delightful book, Robinson's "Wild Garden" says, "What it" (the wild garden) "means is best explained by the winter aconite flowering under a group of naked trees in February; by the snowflake growing abundantly in meadows by the Thames' side; by the perennial lupin dying with its purple an islet in a Scotch river, and by the Apennine anemone staining an English wood blue before the coming of our bluebells".

The perfect type of the wild garden will be of slow evolution here, because almost the entire world of plants is ours to choose from ; but there can be no true garden art here that does not adopt as far as possible the theory of the wild garden. We can plant Japanese and Bermuda lilies in copses with our own carnelian-hued and white wild lilies ; we can mingle the golden-rod of New England with the perennial glory of our flaming eschscholtzias; we can have the white tigridias of Mexico wild on our own hills with the butterfly-bloom of the Mariposas ; we can sow seed of the wild flowers of Syria, Palestine, Carniola, Greece, Italy, Spain, Japan, Australia, South Africa, and let them blossom with our native "cream-cups" and nemophilas. All the shrubs, trees, bulbs, vines, herbaceous plants and annuals known to botanists, can find congenial soil and climate somewhere in California. To be more exact, it is the flora of the whole northern and southern temparate zones, and of the vast acreage of the hill-ground that lies in furrowed folds about the snow peaks of the world, that the coming wild gardens of California will lay under contribution.

We aim to acclimatise the desirable plants for beauty and for use from every source, and to enrich our horti-cultural art with new results of plant sports and cross-fertilizations.

When the great valleys are divided up into ten and twenty acre farms, each farm with its garden, and when the hill slopes, the richest portion of California for horticultural uses, are all likewise cultivated, the range and variety of growth here will be the greatest known to any region on the continent. On the slopes of Mount Lassen, hardy Russian apples and the most iron-clad American grapes are grown; in Colusa county the date palm bears heavily, and would be a profitable tree to plant extensively. Such is the range of climate. It remains for the future to show whether or not the people of California will utilize and develop these unique horticultural advantages. Chas. Howard Shinn.