Plant culture, as an art, has scarcely kept pace with other departments of gardening. A fine, and really well grown specimen plant, is too frequently the work of time or circumstances, rather than the plant-grower's skill. Very few persons, indeed, start out deliberately to grow a good specimen plant; and, indeed, the knowledge of the great pleasure there is in good plant growing, has been nearly lost to mankind. The plant growers of the last generation had much more of these horticultural pleasures than we. Perhaps they overdid the thing, and the lampooners got after them and destroyed the whole thing. It was, indeed, a rare old sight to see the old plant grower's potting shed. There were as many compartments for all sorts of special soils and manures as drawers and boxes in an apothecary's shop, and the prescriptions for successful plant growing were no less curiosities - an eighth of this, a sixteenth of the other, a thirty-second of something else, with perhaps a pinch of some soil condiment and a shake of another, like salt and pepper in the old cook books, set forth the essential conditions of success. It was all too good to be true, to the more careless moderns. Now, they get any sort of earth put a little manure and sand to lighten it; and this is potting soil.

If any plant likes it, well and good; if not, in the classical language of the school-yard, they may " lump if," and this is the end of all. But there is no doubt that all plants have peculiar tastes, which we may pander to if we will that they should do their best. Some have a sweet tooth for goodies, and others prefer what a good set of molars could prepare. Some call for cafe lait, others for cafe noir; here one expects a puree of something or another, while the other can be put off with corn beef and potatoes without a sigh. Of course you can grow a plant in "any good soil" as the flower books tell us, but the plant grower will find what it pays in pleasure to remember, that they have odd whims and queer fancies as well as other living things; and as with other living things, we get the most out of them when we humor them.

In the potting of plants there is much to study as well as in the soil. Plants like it fresh - that is, fresh soil. To grow a plant well we must pot it often. If we put a small plant into a large pot, ten to one the leaves will get yellow after awhile, unless the plant be some rank growing, weedy thing. The roots rot - that is, the feeding roots rot - gardeners say, the soil sours. To guard against this, as soon as the little pot is full of roots, it is put into a larger one - one but just large enough to get a little more earth between the old ball and the new pot. In a few weeks we go at it again, and so we continue every few weeks, so that before the season is over a plant that started in a 3-inch pot finds itself in a six or more, and when it is so grown manure water does not hurt the plant; it rather enjoys and laughs over it. We cannot do this with the little plant in the large pot; manure water then makes the sour soil still sourer, and the end soon comes. Oh ! how glorious used to be the old-fashioned Pelargoniums - Martha Washington we believe is the American name - grown on some such plan as we have dotted out.

Plants in six months two feet high and two feet thick, with leaves as large as saucers, dark and glossy, and the earliest one keeping green till the last flowers had blown - hundreds of flowers on each single plant. Shall we never see these times again ? We think we shall see these famous times again. Gardening, as an art, is inseparable from the best advances of man. The love of beauty - the love of flowers, is one thing - but mere cold, passive, receptive love, is but half the pleasure of life. To create and shape the beauty we admire, is the full measure of earthly happiness. Pygmalion of ancient story had possibly more pleasure in the statue he made, and to which Venus gave life in order to please his enthusiasm, than any of us ever took in the grandest picture gallery in the world.