30 THE GARDENER. [Jan. 



HINTS FOR AMATEURS.— JANUARY. 



The experience from the past dry season will be profitable to many of 

 us. It should teach us to be, as far as we can, provided against diffi- 

 culties to be met in future. We have seen many gardens during the 

 past season entirely parched up, and the produce not sufficient to pay 

 for the labour ; at other places we have seen vegetables, fruits, and 

 flowers finer than perhaps they ever were on the same places before. 

 In the latter places, means in some cases were more scanty than in the 

 places where failures were everywhere apparent ; different methods of 

 cultivation being the cause of success or disappointment. The examples 

 given by the racy writer on the Rose in past numbers are good illustra- 

 tions of what can be done by perseverance, — in one case an enthusiastic 

 Rose-grower is most successful in cultivating the queen of flowers where 

 he was told that they would not exist; another case of a cottager ex- 

 changing a quantity of gravel, stones, &c., for a "pond," which was 

 converted into a productive little garden, in which fruits and flowers 

 were successfully cultivated. We know a number of cottage gardens 

 which a few years ago produced little more than weeds of the worst 

 kind ; but there may be seen in them, every season, flowers and vege- 

 tables which would do credit to the leading professional men in the 

 country. Emulation has sprung up among the inhabitants of villas, 

 who some years ago had scarcely a bit of gravel to tread on, but are 

 now far advanced in the arts of gardening, and have in their gardens 

 fruits and flowers of the choicest kinds, and their grounds decorated in 

 the most tasteful manner. Obstacles are overcome which formerly were 

 considered folly to contend with. The same applies to professionals, 

 who are yearly surmounting difficulties. Fruits are cultivated where 

 soil and climate were considered altogether against them, by lifting 

 the roots up to receive the warmth of the sun, freeing them from stag- 

 nant and unhealthy moisture, keeping off long naked roots and securing 

 bunches of fibres instead, which give fruit-buds and matured wood 

 instead of wild watery growth, which causes so much cutting that the 

 trees become cankered and worthless. We were this autumn struck 

 with the excellent Apples and Pears in the gardens at Tynningham, 

 East Lothian, which were more like fine fruit we have seen in the 

 south of England, Though the soil and climate seem to be congenial, 

 there was something more to which success is to be attributed. The trees 

 are lifted, or otherwise attended to, before rank growth has its own way; 

 besides, there is no doing and undoing, no checking, then applying 

 strong manures (a system practised by some, giving a great deal of 

 labour and destroying the constitution of the trees), but fresh clean 

 soil, and only when necessary. When trees are in such productive con- 



