In addition, we notice that E. P. Roe announces that he has discovered in an old garden in Newburgh, New York, two seedling gooseberries, one of which turns red when ripe, the other and later sort retains its beautiful green color until it drops from the bush, and that both of these are free from mildew. The berries, he says, are large, many specimens measuring three and a quarter by three and a half inches. To the first of these he has given the name of Roe’s Early Ruby, and the other he calls Roe’s Late Emerald, both of which he intends in due time to send out.
It will be a matter of considerable interest to watch the career of these gooseberries. Should they prove to be mildew proof in other places than these where they originated, and to bear abundant crops of large-sized fruit, a new era in the culture of the gooseberry will have been fairly inaugurated, and we may expect to go on multiplying varieties not subject to mildew, until there shall be no lack of gooseberries of fine size and of excellent quality.
—————
THE ROSE A TYPE OF INFINITY.
FROM THE PEN OF THE LATE A. J. DOWNING.
A fresh bouquet of mid-summer roses stands upon the table before us. The morning dew-drops hang, heavy as emeralds, upon branch and bud; soft and rich colors delight the eye with their lovely hues, and that rose-odor, which, every one feels, has not lost anything of its divine sweetness since the first day the flower bloomed in that heaven-garden of Eve, fills the air.
If there is any proof necessary that the rose has a diviner origin than all other flowers, it is easily found in the unvarying constancy of mankind to it for so many long centuries. Fashions there have been innumerable in ornaments of all sorts, from simple sea-shells worn by Nubian maidens, to costly diamonds, that heighten the charms of the proudest court beauties; silver, gold, precious stones, all have their season of favor, and then again sink into comparative neglect, but a simple rose has ever been and will ever be the favorite emblem and adornment of beauty.
Now the secret of this perpetual and undying charm about the rose is not to be found in its color; there are bright lilies, and gay tiger flowers, and dazzling air-plants, far more rich and vivid; it is not alone in fragrance, for there are violets and jasmines with “more passionate sighs of sweetness;” it is not in foliage, for there are laurels and magnolias with leaves of richer and more glossy green. Where then does this secret of the world’s six thousand years’ homage lie? In its being a type of infinity.
Of infinity! says our most innocent maiden reader, who loves roses without caring why, and who does not love infinity, because she does not understand it. Roses a type of infinity! says our theological reader, who has been in the habit of considering all flowers of the field, aye, and of the garden too, as emblems of the short-lived race of man. Yes, we have said it, the secret of the world’s devotion to the rose, of her being the queen of flowers by acclamation and forever, is that the rose is a type of infinity.
The rose is a type of infinity because there is no limit to the variety and beauty of the forms and colors which it assumes. From the wild rose, whose sweet, faint odor is wasted in the depths of the silent wood, or the Eglantine, whose wreaths of fresh sweet blossoms embroider even the dusty road sides, to that most perfect, full, rounded, and odorous flower that swells the heart of the florist as he beholds its richness and symmetry; what an innumerable range of shades, and forms, and colors. And indeed, with the hundreds and thousands of roses of modern times, we still know little of all the varied shapes which the plant has taken in by-gone days, and which have perished with the thousand other refinements and luxuries of the nations who cultivated and enjoyed them.