THE 



GARDENER. 



SEPTEMBER 1869. 



THE BOSE. 



{Continued from page Zi5.) 

 CHAPTER XIV. HOW TO SHOW IT. 



H E N I first exhibited Roses, the boxes selected for the 

 Queen of Flowers were not what royal boxes ought to be. 

 They were ordinary and heterogeneous ; they were high 

 and low, wide and narrow, painted and plain. Disorder 

 prevailed, as at the Floralia of old ; and Bacchus again appeared upon the 

 scene in the cases which had contained his wines, and which, reduced 

 in altitude and filled with dingy moss, now held the glowing Roses. 

 These were kept alive, auspice yEsciilapio, in old physic-bottles filled 

 with water, and plunged to the neck in the moss aforesaid ; but some- 

 times the succulent Potato was used to preserve vitality, and I remem- 

 ber well a large hamper, with its lid gracefully recumbent, in which 

 six small Roses uprose from huge specimens of " Farmers' Profit " — 

 the Pommes de terre being inserted, but not concealed, in a stratum of 

 ancient hay. Sometimes the flowers were crowded together, sometimes 

 they were lonely, neighbourless, like the snipes, in " wisps," and soli- 

 tary ; sometimes they appeared without foliage (at one of our provin- 

 cial shows it was strictly prohibited, and I asked the committee what 

 they meant by coming on the ground with whiskers) ; and sometimes 

 they peeped out of leafy bowers — " plenty of covert, but very little 

 game," as a witty Lincolnshire lord remarked to the clergyman, who 

 asked him, one Christmas morning, what he thought of the decorations 

 of a church in which the evergreens were many and the worshippers 

 few. 



2 c 



