THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



203 



LONDOX SOSES. 



In every pursuit there are certain hillocks 

 to climb ovei 1 , and deeps to span. The 

 mariner may sail round the world, and be 

 •wrecked at last on the very reef whereon 

 he tried his gun for the first time, within 

 sight of his mother's cottage. The culture 

 ot (jhe rose, in the vicinity of great towns, 

 is one ot' those touchy tasks tint I - 

 man's patience and perseverance quite as 

 much as his skid, and we may call it one of 

 the peaks in the path of the suburban 

 gardener. It is ten years since I made 

 my first attempt to domesticate the rose 

 in a rather rural, but very smoky, district, 

 just one and a.- half miles north of the 

 General Post Ollice. Swan's Egg pear 

 there used to produce fruit abundantly in 

 favourable seasons; figs fruited on the 

 walls, aud almost everything in the ordinary 

 run of garden stock did well, except grass 

 aud roses. A bit of good turf was worth 

 a guinea a scpiare foot, and it would cost 

 almost that to patch aud mend and keep it 

 decent. The roses were a failure, for the 

 simple reason that I went the wrong way 

 to work. It has been a fashion ever since 

 the introduction of the system of working 

 roses on briars, to plant standards on grass, 

 aud with the grass to their stems, and that 

 fashion has been fatal to more roses than 

 any other similarly based onfalseprineiples. 

 I am very glad I went the way of the 

 fashion then, for it taught me more about 

 the constitution of the rose than all that 

 I have read and observed since. It taught 

 me that a briar must be fed with liquid as 

 well as solid food in plenty, and that on 

 grass tli- feeding is just impossible. It 

 taught me also that st mdards are only 

 stumps, unless well treated at the roots, 

 and m the enjoyment of a good at no- 

 sphere for the head. Take stock of the 

 roses in suburban gardens, and of every 

 hundred standards planted on grass, with 

 no open soil around them, you shall find 

 ninety in a starving, drifts 1, shrunk con- 

 dition, less elegant in outline than birch 

 brooms, and less agreeable in colour, 

 because a birch broom has a nice shining 

 brown bark on all its twigs, but the roses 

 are a bad mixture of black and green, 

 and only bearable during their short 

 season of indifferent bloom. This remark 

 does not apply with force to the oage of 

 roses farther off, because the farther you 

 go from towns the batter are the conditions 

 and the more liberal the people as to 

 proper expenses for gardening. Sooner 



than see the roses starve, the suburban 

 gardeners, in many places, strip up the 

 grass round all their rose-trees at the 

 fall, and lay over their roots a good layer 

 of fat dung, and then relay the turf. But. 

 • h u even is a po >r m ikeshifl . and will n it 

 •ave the system from the condemnation 

 it deserve?. If we observe how the dog 

 ros grows wil 1, we shall fin I the stoutest 

 and most lusty growths along tli i he Ige- 

 rows of a clay country, where their roots 

 get plenty of water, and very often some 

 stronger stuff from the byre and the 

 manure heap, but where there is never 

 any stagnant wet. A bit of real clav, 

 that has been laid up all winter to pul- 

 verize, is. when enriched with m mure, the 

 best possible soil in which to plant briars 

 for budding, and also all dowering standard 

 roses, which are the same briars in another 

 stage of cultivation. If the smoke of 

 towns does harm to the rose, the state of 

 the soil does much more harm to the 

 root, and the more attention is paid to 

 this basis of operations, the more will the 

 field widen for the growth of roses in 

 towns. But the closer we come to the 

 centre of a town, the more must we in- 

 cline to short roses, and at last give up 

 standards altogether. 



The state of the case may be re- 

 presented by a diagram, and suburban 

 gardeners are recommended to adapt the 

 diagram to their own geographical position 

 in regard to the towns to which they are 

 attached. Suppose we begin in the centre 

 of the city of London, there I should say 

 use none but roses on their own' roots ; 

 travelling outwards, in any one direction, 

 I should not expect to see roses on briars 

 till I had made a radius of two miles, and 

 then I would have the n short. The 

 taller they are in towns, the greater is 

 the difficulty of keeping them alive. At 

 another mile from St. Paul's or the Post 

 Office, I would have half standards ; and at 

 one mile more, full standards: an 1 at five 

 miles they might be of anv height desired, 

 to form weeping roses on lawns and back 

 rows of broad banks. Here then is the 

 diagram, which may be considered as 

 representing the gradation of heights, on 

 a radius of five miles from St. Paul's 

 Cathedral. 



Whatever exceptions may be made to 

 such a rule must still be in accordance 

 with the principle it involves. It may 

 happen that iu the three-mile radius the 



