298 Modern Improvements in Horticulture, 



mer, and autumn, their constitutional winter arrives before 

 our natural summer is over, therefore they should have an arti- 

 ficial winter also provided for them. This we can only do for 

 portable plants, by removing them to a north and shady border, 

 and with others that are stationary we can only expose them as 

 much as possible to the coldest air, and screen them from all 

 excitements of either heat or light. 



Plants, by unseasonable treatment, accommodate themselves 

 to the change : thus, if a potted vine be taken out of the house 

 at Midsummer, and pruned in September, it will bear forcing 

 earlier, or will, of itself, shoot earlier than another kept in the 

 house later, and not pruned till November; and, if this be 

 continued annually, the plant may be brought to a complete 

 reverse of season, if all other circumstances of light and heat 

 be supplied ; similar in all respects to the vines and other 

 northern plants cultivated at the Cape of Good Hope, or any 

 other part of the southern hemisphere. 



Next to the severity of the winter's cold and summer's heat, 

 the attacks of insects are the most formidable. They are a 

 great army, with which the gardener must be ever at war. The 

 enumeration and description of all that infest our gardens would 

 take up too much of this paper, I shall therefore only mention 

 a few of the most destructive and best known, viz. : 



Aphides. — This is a most, if not the most numerous class of 

 insects in this country. There are several species of them ; but, 

 as they receive their colour from the quality of the plant on 

 which they feed, naturalists have made many more species than 

 there really are. On beans and alder they are called blacks ; 

 on pease, shrimps ; on hops they are called lice ; and on roses, 

 vines, and peach-trees they are called *' the green fly." In 

 spring and summer they are viviparous ; in autumn oviparous : 

 are produced by animalcular generation, hence prodigiously 

 prolific ; the males, and some generations of females, winged, 

 so that they spread over the face of the country in dry seasons 

 with astonishing rapidity. Their food seems to be a saccharine 

 extract from the plant, as their excrement is the honey-dew, of 

 which, in some seasons, the greater part of the sweet store of 

 our apiaries is composed : — hence may be identified the plants 



