TRANSACTIONS

OF THE

Wisconsin State Horticultural Society

SUMMER MEETING.

The Summer Meeting was held at Shiocton on August 28th, 1907, President R. J. Coe in the Chair.

The morning session was opened with prayer by Rev. Mr. Jordan.

The President then introduced Mr. W. D. Boynton, of Shiocton, who made the address of welcome.

ADDRESS BY MR. BOYNTON.

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:-I presume when this meeting was called for Shiocton some of you had to get out your map or atlas and look up that little place. If I recollect rightly, it is the smallest place that ever had the honor of a State Meeting of the Horticultural Society, and I assure you that Shiocton feels the honor very keenly. There are perhaps some reasons why it was brought here, say some three or four prominent reasons, and I think perhaps the leading one was the fact that Shiocton had

been taken hold of qu'te severely lately by some Chicago capitalists, or Illinois capitalists, who created a land company here for the purpose of developing some four or five thousand acres of our waste lands. President Bridge has been one of the motives or powers back of this gather ng, he has advertised it very freely, and he has commenced and performed a very large and unique work in the way of drainage and land improvement, and this Land Company has brought here a very noted horticulturist, Mr. Crawford, of Ohio, and that is another very strong card that helped to secure th's meeting for Shiocton. We have appreciated Mr. Crawford's presence here very much this summer. Not only is he celebrated as a horticulturist, and justly celebrated all over this country and has been in the work through a lifetime, he is known in every state in the Union, but he has written for all the leading agricultural and horticultural papers and wherever he has worked he has done good work, we may be sure of that. But he has also pleased us personally very much; we have found his kindly presence in the community a very great boon, and we cannot say too many good words for Mr. Crawford who has been carrying on the work for the Sh'octon Land Company.

Perhaps another leading motive for bringing this meeting to Shiocton is the fact that we have here Mr. Eben E. Rexford, who has been a resident of th's town all his life nearly, and who is also a writer of national and even international repute, and his especial work has been along the floral line, and this is a floral meeting. Mr. Rexford is the author of several noted books on floriculture, particularly those of an amateur character for the home flower grower, and Mr. Rexford has also attained considerable fame as a writer of verse and prose, so I think we may giver Mr. Rexford quite a bit of the motive of bringing this meeting to this place.

Now the conditions of Shiocton have been peculiar in the past. I want to give just a few words, stating why Shiocton should be noted particularly at this time. It is quite a small town, there are lots of larger towns in the State, but consider the fact that this was a tumble-down lumber town some twenty years ago, and consider the fact that in the late eighties and early nineties fires swept over these swamps. Swamps pressed up against Shiocton on both sides, the tamarack pressed into the village on the east and the same on the west, so that we have

T

been between two swamps until those dry years successive fires swept off the timber and succeeding fires completed what the first ones started, and from them it was burned clean, à part of the muck burned, part of the moss burned and it left it like a great prairie. People who owned these lands could plow a mile long furrow and they did so in a great many cases. Some of the outside land owners did not improve the opportunity of holding these lands, cleared as they were by the fire, but let them grow up to brush again, and so you see patches of brushes and very unsightly stretches of land. But these great fires left the ground coated with ashes and a great many people put grass in and it threw up tremendous crops of grass each year, then it subsided and we found we would have to go into those lands and farm and cultivate with manures like any other land, so the vegetable business naturally started in. We had started that bet fore the fire in a mild way, but after these fires it opened up these large areas just adapted to vegetable growing, and C. A. Kerr of Chicago started in here and built a very large stone storage warehouse, and the farmers around here have been building storage since. Now we have a large storage capacity for vegetables in rank this place stands next to Racine in the production of vegetables, and there is another point why the State meeting should come here. We now stand ahead of Green Bay on the production of coarse vegetables, and we must stand next to Racine.

We have found, as I said before, that our land needs fertilizing, we have also found that these lands needed drainage, very flat, low, level land, and the land was sour from the long succession of wet years after the dry ones, and it needed just the work that the Shiocton Land Company is putting in to demonstrate the value of these lands. They have instituted a large system of drainage, they made something like 6 miles of ditches, I think their plan called for something like seven or eight miles of canals these are canals twenty feet wide on top and ten to six feet deep; the plan is to lead into these drains by means of tile drainage to get the best results.

I simply want to say for myself that it is a very great pleasure to meet you here. I used to meet with the State Horticultural Society twice a year and have been in the work for a good many years and it is a great pleasure to meet you all here,

Speaking for Shiocton, I want to say there is nothing too good for you in this village. We appreciate the honor of your coming here and we appreciate the disadvantages we labor under; we have small hotel capacities and we have provided against that by going to private families and there is not a house that has a spare bed but that will welcome you, and we hope no one will go away tonight that wants to attend this meeting because they have not any room to stay. Shiocton is wide open to you and extends to you a hearty welcome. (Applause.)

The President-I am sure all the visiting horticulturists are very grateful for these hearty words of welcome. Horticulturists you know are good natured people, the best natured people in the world, and so then it is a great pleasure to us to come here and meet the horticulturists of Shiocton. We expect to have a good time, and I know we will not be disappointed. When the invitation was first extended to the Horticultural Society to meet here for their summer meeting there was a great deal of doubt expressed as to whether it would be wise to hold a meet-· ing in a place of the size of Shiocton, because you know Shiocton is not the largest city in the state, but I see we have made no mistake; we are very much surprised and exceedingly gratified at the audience we have here this morning, it seems to me it is about the best attendance we have had at any horticultural meeting in a great many years, and so then we are glad to meet with you and we will be sorry to part from you.

BULBS, CORMS AND TUBERS.

E. G. ARZBERGER, Madison.

It has been the poets privilege to give expression to his fancies in regard to the beautiful and charming structure, like those surrounding you, which issues forth from bulb, corm and even from such an odd looking form as the tuber. He has painted for us the infloresences in beautiful similes and metaphors, he has crowned them with the best of prizes to express his deep felt sentiments. Yet little do those parts which possess the vital