How To Get Catalogues

Is the reader a beginner in gardening? Is he ignorant of the names of seedsmen? Is he one of those unhappy beings who own no membership of gardening societies ? The way to invite a cataract of catalogues is to join the Royal Horticultural Society, or some other prominent horticultural body. What happens is this: The Secretary prints your name and address in his list of members (members are "Fellows" in the case of the Royal Horticultural Society, you can become a Fellow for one guinea), and a horde of enterprising seedsmen extract them and post you lists. If, however, you have no membership or fellowship, and catalogues do not pour in spontaneously, there is a simple way of getting them. It is to buy a gardening paper the next time that you are at a railway bookstall, or in a newspaper shop, and send postcards to some of the advertisers.

The Price Of Seeds

The catalogues come. Some of them are small octavo publications, with a few illustrations. Others are thick quarto volumes of several hundred pages, with numerous photographic figures, and possibly some coloured plates also. There is more of interest in the richly illustrated quarto than in the plain octavo, and possibly the latter is put aside in the first place, only to be turned to again if it is found that the order made up from the larger volume has run into several pounds more than it was expected to do. Can a buyer safely turn to a small dealer for his garden seeds?

Can he economise in seeds without running serious risk of his garden becoming a wilderness of noxious weeds? The answer to these questions is: Yes, provided he is satisfied with standard varieties of the different kinds of vegetables and flowers. There are certain sorts of Peas, Beans, Lettuces, Sweet Peas, annual Phloxes, Asters, Stocks, and so forth which are in such constant demand that it pays wholesale dealers to grow them largely and sell them cheaply to retail seedsmen. Even small provincial representatives of the latter class can be relied upon, as a general rule, to supply seeds of standard sorts true to type, fresh, and of good germinating power.

The large seed houses, whose trial grounds are seen, radiant with bloom, from the railway carriages on many lines, and whose catalogues are almost worthy of being described as works of art, have specialities of their own, often superior to the standard sorts. These cannot be bought at low prices.