Hot-house Plants Research Articles

Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais

Reviewed by: Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais Janice Niemann (bio) Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present by Jane Desmarais; pp. 256. Reaction Books, 2018. $46.18 cloth. The victorian hothouse was a place of paradoxes. Jane Desmarais explores these paradoxes in Monsters under Glass: A Cultural History of Hothouse Flowers from 1850 to the Present, focusing on English Decadent writers, such as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and French Realist artists, such as Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Claude Monet, and Émile Zola, at the fin de siècle. Monsters under Glass includes chapters on the history of the hothouse, hothouses in cities, flowers, scents, paradisiacal and torturous gardens, and other glass structures such as aquariums. Highlighting developments in hot-house technologies and historical perceptions of the hothouse, Desmarais positions this "alluring yet dangerous" (7) space as a literary metaphor that simultaneously calls to mind horticultural experimentation and invasion by foreign bodies, crowded urban settings and isolated life under glass, fruitful reproduction and illicit sex, death and decay and flourishing life. Desmarais weaves nineteenth-century anxieties about modernization, the role of women, colonial expansion, scientific hybridization, and fear of the other through her succinct analyses of late nineteenth-century prose, poetry, paintings, and illustrations. Following existing scholarship on the place of gardens in nineteenth-century literature, Desmarais aligns the Victorian hothouse with other semi-private garden spaces, such as the conservatory and the shrubbery, as a site of sexual transgression, of "amatory and often clandestine encounters" (128). While Desmarais's premise that the hothouse is a transgressive space is not, on its own, a revolutionary idea, Monsters under Glass provides a much-needed complement to existing scholarship on Victorian greenhouses and glasshouses. Isabel Armstrong's Victorian Glassworlds (2008) offers [End Page 160] an insightful history of the role of glass itself in the Victorian imagination and Victorian literature, and explores the role of the conservatory in literature, but does not go in depth into glass's specific use as a hothouse material. Amy King's Bloom (2003) proposes that metaphors of blooming flowers indicate a woman's marriageability in nineteenth-century novels, but she focuses on flowers generally and tends to emphasize the act and language of "blooming" more than the cultural histories and social implications of the flowers themselves within floral metaphors. Lindsay Wells's Victorian Studies article "Close Encounters of the Wardian Kind: Terrariums and Pollution in the Victorian Parlor" (2018) digs into the role that Wardian cases—small glass enclosures that create sustainable microclimates for growing plants, often foreign plants—play in nineteenth-century art history, but not that of larger glass structures. In studying the hothouse as a unique metaphor or trope, Desmarais's book fills a gap in this scholarship and adds to the fertile fields of garden studies, glass studies, and space studies in Victorian literature and culture. Particularly important to the field are her argument that late nineteenth-century artists, especially Félicien Rops and Beardsley, completely overturned the cultural connotations of the so-called language of flowers in their depictions of floral women and women as flowers, depicting, instead, women who are "active and sexual" and, fittingly for hothouse flowers, "modern hybrids" (160); her demonstration that the hothouse metaphor shifts in meaning alongside developing hothouse technologies, a change that speaks to late-century anxieties about modernization; and her proposal that hot-house metaphors always have nineteenth-century connotations. This last point makes Desmarais's book of interest to scholars outside the field of Victorian studies as well. Desmarais's prose is refreshingly accessible and engaging, she offers a succinct history of gardening, hothouses, and hothouse plants, and she is a strong close reader—highlights of her readings include her analyses of Manet's Music in the Tuileries, Arthur Symons's London Nights, and Octave Mirbeau's Le petit pavillon and Le jardin des supplices. While in a few places I would have liked to see more citations or more extended textual analysis (because these moments are some of the book's strongest), and some of the historical explanations focus more on...

Progress on the amendment in biochars and its effects on the soil-plant-micro-organism-biochar system.

Abstract Biochar, coal produced by pyrolysis and used as an amendment, has several advantages and has proven to be a promising avenue for sustainable agriculture. However, the current manufacturing methods, the conditions of pyrolysis and the biomasses used produce biochars of very variable qualities which can differently affect the productivity of the ground and the outputs of plants. Currently, no study makes it possible to elucidate the influence of the physicochemical properties of the biochars on the structure and the microbial diversity of the soil. The aim of this review was to understand how the physicochemical properties of a biochar affect its capacity: to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases; to improve the growth of hothouse plants; to improve the effectiveness of the use of manures and water; and to modify the structure and the diversity of the bacterial communities in a horticultural substrate and a mineral soil. These biochars were produced under various conditions. The analyses show that the addition of biochar can stimulate certain groups of bacteria involved in carbon and nitrogen cycles and possibly those involved in the development of plants. This review identifies the important physicochemical properties of the biochars, which will be able to better guide agricultural producers and industries manufacturing substrates containing peat, in the choice of a biochar favorable to the growth of plants and a more durable agriculture.

Optimization of actions for regulation of number of sucking vermin of hothouse plants in M.M. Gryshko National Botanical Garden of the NAS of Ukraine

Optimization of actions for regulation of number of sucking vermin of hothouse plants in M.M. Gryshko National Botanical Garden of the NAS of Ukraine

Skepticism and American Faith: Infidels, Converts, and Religious Doubt in the Early Nineteenth Century

In the spring of 1839, Abner Kneeland left Boston for good. The infamous freethinker, a former Baptist and then Universalist minister who had renounced Christianity, had spent sixty days in jail for blasphemy the previous summer. In that same year William Miller, formerly a skeptical deist and now a Baptist preacher, gave his first Boston lecture, arguing that Christ would return to earth in 1843. As Kneeland shook the dust of Boston from his shoes and Miller proclaimed that the end was near, Boston lawyer and politician Horace Mann extended his public crusade for education reform and struggled privately with religious doubt. By 1839, another Bostonian, Orestes Brownson, had already been a Presbyterian, a Universalist, and a freethinking socialist. The thirty-six-year-old editor of the Boston Quarterly Review was by now a staunch Democrat in a Whig city and a Unitarian in the orbit of New England Transcendentalism. Few writers of the period wrote with more sustained attention to the problem that concerned all four men: the challenge of religious skepticism to the grounds of American faith.1 In an era we have come to associate with evangelical revivalism, religious reformers, Emersonian optimism, and the consolidation of the Bible belt, Brownson argued that is not much open skepticism, not much avowed infidelity, but there is a vast amount of concealed doubt, and untold difficulty. Those religious doubts have remained hidden because of the stories we tell about the country's religious past. Scholars who have applied the secularization thesis to American religious history, a model that often assumes a waning significance of religion in the modern world, have always struggled with the American case, where religious affiliation and belief in God have remained very high compared to other industrialized nations. Secularization in the United States, some scholars explain, has been structural rather than psychological. Non-religious institutions and discourses have taken over functions once performed by churches and God talk, but this has not been accompanied by a significant rise in the proportion of the population that doubts or rejects religious truth claims. According to this modification of the secularization thesis, religious belief and practice have not withered away in the face of modem rationality and secular agnosticism; religion instead has been privatized. Structural change, not religious skepticism, is at the center of this story.2 Since the early 1980s, other scholars have moved from the secularization model to narratives stressing American religious vitality. The religious doubts of people like Brownson, Miller, Kneeland, and Mann are not especially important to these interpretations either. By the 1830s, most religious histories tell us, the radical implications of Enlightenment thought had been discredited by the French Revolution, David Hume's skepticism had been answered by Scottish Common Sense Realism, and the popular religious infidelity of rabble-rousers like Ethan Allen, Thomas Paine, and Elihu Palmer had been crushed by Christian polemics and evangelical activism. Visionary freethought reformers like Robert Owen and Frances Wright were foreign hothouse plants unable to bear fruit in God's American Canaan. If the origins of later unbelief can be found in some of the religious debates of this period, the great age of religious doubt lay ahead, in the post-Darwinian era of William James and Henry Adams. From this perspective too, it is not surprising that the few skeptics and freethinkers who did speak out earlier in the nineteenth century are consigned to the footnotes in studies of revival and reform.3 To pay more attention to both open infidelity and concealed doubt is not to argue that either is more important than the surging, protean religiosity in early nineteenth-century American life. Perhaps critical deists like the early Miller, closet skeptics like Mann, and vocal freethinkers like Kneeland and (briefly) Brownson do not deserve more space in surveys of American religious history. …

Production and labour in the Swedish manufactories during the 18th century Part II

Abstract During a long period of time a well-established opinion in the Swedish historical writing was that the prominence and support given to the Swedish manufactories during the 18th century was an economic failure. They were political “hot house plants”, which could bring about some production only because of substantial state subsidies. They gained their greatest importance during the period when the caps held power in the 1740s and 1750s. But after the trade crisis in the middle of the 1760s and the contemporary changes in the political power structure, the manufactories more or less faded away.

Production and labour in the Swedish manufactories during the 18th century

Abstract During a long period of time a well-established opinion in the Swedish historical writing was that the prominence and support given to the Swedish manufactories during the 18th century was an economic failure. They were political “hot house plants”, which could bring about some production only because of substantial state subsidies. They gained their greatest importance during the period when the caps held power in the 1740s and 1750s. But after the trade crisis in the middle of the 1760s and the contemporary changes in the political power structure, the manufactories more or less faded away.

Low level of SO 2 enhanced chromatid aberrations in tradescantia pollen tubes and seasonal variation of the aberration rates

Pollen tube cultures of Tradescantia paludosa Anders. Sax clone-3 were grown on microslides coated with lactose agar medium (0.02% colchicine). They were incubated in an air-tight moist chamber for 18 h to obtain the metaphase chromosomes of the pollen tube generative nuclei. SO 2 treatments were applied at the beginning of the germination stage, 7–10 min after sowing the pollen. A total of about 0.075 ppm of SO 2 was used for the entire incubation period. SO 2 gas was either generated by the reaction between K 2S 2O 5 and HCl inside the chamber or obtained from diluting the gas from commercial SO 2 gas (Matheson Gas Products) of known concentration through a gas dilution system. Full-grown cultures fixed in Gate's fluid and stained in Feulgen were made into permanent slides for aberration-rate determination. Year-round study of SO 2 effect on chromosomes was made possible by using a GRO-LUX lamp (Sylvania) illuminated incubator, in winter, to promote mitotic activity of pollen culture. In these studies, SO 2 enhanced chromatid aberration rates (average 46 breaks/100 cells) in the cultures grown from field or hot-house plants during 3 consecutive summers (1970–1972). There was a gradual decrease in the fall and a gradual increase in spring in both background and enhanced aberration rates. When summer pollen cultures from GRO-LUX lamp pre-conditioned (7–20 days) plants were treated with SO 2 in the same chamber with those grown from summer hot-house plants, high rate (42 breaks/100 cells) of aberration was observed only in cultures from summer hot-house plants.

Low level of SO2 enhanced chromatid aberrations in tradescantia pollen tubes and seasonal variation of the aberration rates

Pollen tube cultures of Tradescantia paludosa Anders. Sax clone-3 were grown on microslides coated with lactose agar medium (0.02% colchicine). They were incubated in an air-tight moist chamber for 18 h to obtain the metaphase chromosomes of the pollen tube generative nuclei. SO 2 treatments were applied at the beginning of the germination stage, 7–10 min after sowing the pollen. A total of about 0.075 ppm of SO 2 was used for the entire incubation period. SO 2 gas was either generated by the reaction between K 2 S 2 O 5 and HCl inside the chamber or obtained from diluting the gas from commercial SO 2 gas (Matheson Gas Products) of known concentration through a gas dilution system. Full-grown cultures fixed in Gate's fluid and stained in Feulgen were made into permanent slides for aberration-rate determination. Year-round study of SO 2 effect on chromosomes was made possible by using a GRO-LUX lamp (Sylvania) illuminated incubator, in winter, to promote mitotic activity of pollen culture. In these studies, SO 2 enhanced chromatid aberration rates (average 46 breaks/100 cells) in the cultures grown from field or hot-house plants during 3 consecutive summers (1970–1972). There was a gradual decrease in the fall and a gradual increase in spring in both background and enhanced aberration rates. When summer pollen cultures from GRO-LUX lamp pre-conditioned (7–20 days) plants were treated with SO 2 in the same chamber with those grown from summer hot-house plants, high rate (42 breaks/100 cells) of aberration was observed only in cultures from summer hot-house plants.

Populist Influences On American Fascism

HE DOCTRINAL roots of American fascist thought have long remained obscure for reasons inherent in recent American history itself. Essentially fascist popular movements grew up in America during the period 1929-41 at a time when American publicists and intellectuals were rediscovering America in their reaction to the growth of fascism and nazism abroad. Increased regard for American tradition among hitherto alienated intellectuals made them reluctant to admit that movements such as those led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin, and Gerald L. K. Smith were not the result of temporary psychological aberrations on the part of the masses but were, instead, the culmination of an ideological development stemming from such generally revered movements as Populism and agrarian democracy. For them fascism was by definition un-American. The sentimental quasi-Marxism of many influential writers reinforced this refusal to search for the roots of American fascism in American political history. When not dismissed as exotic imports, fascist ideas were held to be hothouse plants carefully nurtured by domestic capitalists bent on cultivating their own financial gardens while Western civilization was at stake in a death struggle waged by the democratic masses against the new barbarism.

The economic Status of Indian Thysanoptera

In India the economic rôle played by insects of the order Thysanoptera, popularly known as “ thrips,” has not become so conspicuous as in some other parts of the world. The different kinds of thrips affecting specific crops such as wheat, oats, tobacco, fruits, onions, cacao and hot-house plants, in Europe, America, the West Indies and many tropical areas, are insects of established notoriety, and some of them cause severe and extensive damage to valuable crops from time to time ; but so far no species of Thysanoptera has as yet gained such prominence in India. Neither Lefroy in his book on “ Indian Insect Pests ” (1904), nor Fletcher in his publication on “ South Indian Insects ” (1914), has recorded any insect of this group as a definite pest among the numerous forms listed as injurious. In his other and more voluminous text-book, “ Indian Insect Life ” (1909), however, Lefroy, in the course of a brief chapter devoted to Thysanoptera, just refers to the three Indian species which were the only ones recorded till then, viz. : Idolothrips halidayi and Phloeothrips anacardii, described by Newman in 1856, and Panchaetothrips indicus, described by Bagnall in 1912 ; and only one of these, the last, had any economic importance, having been noted on turmeric in Madras.

A New Approach to the Teaching of Homiletics

At times every minister feels dissatisfied with his preaching. To outward appearances talking is a futile activity. Many sermons are hot-house plants which flourish in the subdued light of the sanctuary, but which wither before the penetrating glare of the street. The honest preacher often feels that his work is unreal and ineffective. Prophets have ever been plagued with uneasy moodsand yet much of the futility of our preaching can be traced to deficiencies in training. Homiletic instruction has commonly centered about sermon-building. The student has been trained to construct logical outlines and to write lucid English. The lore of preaching has been presented through lectures by leading lights of the pulpit. In some instances voice-training has been available for those who desired it. Such training has commonly produced sermonizers rather than preachers. In his first charge the ordinary theologue preaches to himself rather than to the people. His sermons are logical in structure and polished in execution, but utterly harmless when it comes to touching the lives of the people. Preaching, to the young minister, is usually a means of grace to be practiced for its own sake rather than a tool with which to achieve certain spiritual results. He assumes that a good sermon, in the seminary sense, will somehow bless those who sit under it. Often the polished sermon actually stands between the truth which is in the heart of the preacher and the real needs of the people.