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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...in Europe and raised seedlings for five years, carefully selecting in each generation the ones that most appealed. There was a considerable tendency to vary within rather narrow limits, some plants being deeper in color than others, but the divergence was not at first very marked. In the third year, however, there suddenly appeared a mutant having a blossom of bright red color instead of the usual rather dull crimson. As the chive can be multiplied indefinitely by division, this single plant might have become the progenitor of a race of red flowering chives. But I wished to see what the hereditary tendency would be, and so raised about ten thousand seedlings from the red flowering stock. Nearly all of these seedlings reverted to a pink color. There had been a faint tinge of rosy pink in the original flower, obscured by the crimson, but the new seedlings bore blossoms of a pleasing pink color, and constitute a new and highly attractive variety. While thus developing a pleasing flower and thereby adding to the attractiveness of the chive as a border plant, I paid attention also to the bulb and stalk of the plant itself as well as to the flavor. In the course of five or six generations I developed the bulb so that the average size is about twenty times that of the bulbs of the stock with which we began. Thus the new race of chives not only supplies a pink flower which has a very handsome effect when massed in contrast with the characterless flowers of its ancestor, but it is also relatively gigantic in bulb as compared with them. Thus its value as an ornamental plant and its utility as a food plant were enhanced simultaneously, and somewhat in the same proportion. These results have been attained by selective breeding, without hybridizing, in the...

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