This section is from the book "The Gardener's Monthly And Horticulturist V23", by Thomas Meehan. See also: Four-Season Harvest: Organic Vegetables from Your Home Garden All Year Long.
From Mr. Needham of Washington, D. C, we have a colored plate representing a yellow peach three and three-quarter inches wide. It is said that when gathered in autumn before hard frost, it will keep through November, and that the flavor is first-class.
B. B., Lebanon, Pa., asks the following question, for which we should be obliged by information about from any one who knows: "I have a large quantity of what I take to be red or river birch. The trees are of all sizes, from quite small to very large. The wood is white and short in fibre. Can you inform me whether it is used in the manufacture of wood pulp for paper, and details?"
Exact figures as to the length of time seeds will retain their vital powers are not common. But here is one. Mr.'Leroy of Columbia College, looking over, in the winter of 1879-80, the plants of Wilkes Exploring Expedition, collected in Patagonia, between 1838-42, found three seeds of a gourd, which were planted in his garden in the spring of 1880. Two of the three grew, and bore fruit the same season. This fixes forty years of vital power for these seeds.
It is a "Golden Dogwood" that has been afflicted by this "tony" name.
"The Gardener's Monthly cites as an illustration of the unstability of the popular names of plants, the fact that our ox-eye daisy is known in Scotland as horse gowan.
Here in Marblehead it is commonly called bull's eye, and we were quite surprised to find on our recent visit to St. John, N. B., that this was the popular name there." - Marblehead (Mass.) Messenger.
Rev. E. P. P. says: "I have on my table a rose fully developed (Pius IX); out of the center rises a perfect stem, bearing a perfect rose, calyx, petals, etc., the rose is not quite fully opened."
[Morphologically, a rose flower is but a contracted branch. The leaves or petals of the flower might have been real leaves, and it is such illustrations as this which prove the law. - Ed. G.M.]
Gentleness or fragility is not exactly attributable to the woodbine; it has strangled many a tree. Cowper more correctly describes it:
"In spiral rings ascendes the trunk and lays Her golden tassels on the leafy sprays, But does a mischief while she lends a grace, Straightening its growth by such a strict embrace."
 
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