The Horticultural Show.

Gisborne Times, Volume VI, Issue 290, 14 December 1901, Page 3

The Horticultural Show.

(To the Editor of the Times.)

g IK The absence of massiveness and color in the arrangements were remarkable. Not a flag—the British or our own —met the eye with their suggestive bands representing sword blades, spear staves, stars, and emblematic Christianity: this was an oversight probably. And the queen of the floral world, the rose, was not sufiiciently represented. The flower stand on the stage was superb. The dressed tables were neatly cold and crampedly poor. Too, too much white, suggestive of Antarctic snowfields. Nature provides a green ground for her lovely efforts ; taste or fashion, as last night, substitutes the icy-cold gleam of snow on which to place those fairy forms requiring softness and harmonising adjustments of well-chosen colors for their field of view. X wished much to meet the cactuses there, as on last year’s Show ; one only exhibited. There is a noble plant in a warden on Gladstone road, and the committee might have done well by exhibiting a branch of it. It is the opuntia tuna, a native of the West Indies, and grows to 20 feet in height. There is another cactus in a street by the Gas-works, likely to be the mamillaria haageana, a native of Mexico —a remarkable-looking follow indeed, challenging admiration. There were very fine plants of tho epiphylium, phyllocactus, and cercus exhibited last year. The “ Flowers of Scientific Sound,” as exhibited from the orchestra last evening, were excellent. The ornamentation surrounding tho instrumentalists were their own happy faces and the good nature which impelled the big brass thunder down to the silver jingle of tho triangles. —I am, etc., Old Boy.