Authentic Science Fiction Monthly, No. 65 — page 34: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION crack. Take that American smallholder who meant to grow winter squash on his handkerchief-sized allotment, without the vines sprawling all over the place, depriving him of much needed space on which to grow _ other vegetables. He put the poser to “Doc”? Yeager, who set about correcting the wasteful prodigality of Nature. Now, you can grow his Baby Blue in a window-box, for it’s bearing 3 lb. fruit right on the stem. Francis ““Wizard of Rose” Meilland gleefully rubbed his hands when Jean Dyens, “‘king’’ of France’s commer- cial growers, asked him to restyle a better forcing variety for the cut-flower trade. Of course, Dyens wanted a hardier and freer from disease new rose. He wanted to be able to cut its blooms with fairly long stems without undue harm to the plant. He wanted petals with an extra- strong texture, so as to travel to distant markets and arrive in a dewy state of freshness. And, oh yes, he wanted the new variety to be more liberal with its blooms—in ~ 33 lieu of the 8 to 12 yielded per year by its predecessors, he wanted 20. At a pinch, Dyens was willing to settle for 15. Fight years and exactly 18,652 seedlings later, the world-famed rosarian, from Cap d’Antibes, came up with Happiness, which is the exact answer to Dyens’s dreams. To this end, Meilland has built into a Hybrid Tea rose not only extra-wide petals, but also more of them, so that they might better cling together, thus doubling their longevity. With its sixty petals —instead of the run-of-the- mill twenty-five—and greater floriferousness, that lovely new rose has become perhaps the fastest money-spinner for commercial growers the world over. But the public at large has no inkling of all the hard toil that goes into such achieve- ments. It takes at once a hard-headed realist and a visionary idealist, endowed with intuition and a bull-dog tenacity, to present the world with such novel varieties, showing vast improvements over their predecessors. Of course, the discovery of comiclooks.cormn