Page:The family kitchen gardener - containing plain and accurate descriptions of all the different species and varieties of culinary vegetables (IA familykitchengar56buis).pdf/153



is a hardy perennial, and may be propagated by slips, in March or October, or raised from seeds sown after they are ripe. The leaves have a strong, offensive smell, and a very bitter, nauseous taste; the flower equally bitter, but less nauseous. Wormwood is a moderately warm stomachic and corroborant, and for these purposes it was formerly in common use, but it has now given place to bitters of a less ungrateful kind. Wormwood was formerly much used by brewers instead of Hops, to give the bitter taste to their malt liquors, and to preserve them. This plant very powerfully resists putrefaction, and is made a principal ingredient in antiseptic fomentations.

word Spring, when applied to the Season, is everywhere known. When thus applied by us in the preceding pages, it is intended to convey to the reader the period of the year when the buds of the earliest trees appear green. Early in Spring is indicated by the buds on the trees beginning to swell. Late in Spring, when the leaves have put forth.

About Philadelphia, Spring generally begins from the 10th to the 15th of March.

In South Carolina, the northern parts of Georgia and Alabama, Spring begins five weeks earlier than it does with us.

In the southern parts of Virginia and Kentucky, Spring generally opens about the 20th of February.

In Massachusetts and the upper part of New York, Spring opens from the 25th of March to the first of April.

By these observations being kept in view, the details of this work may be made applicable to any part of the United States.