THE FLOEAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 17 



lcurve 

 stripes and tips. 



a large, incurved flower, of a rich rosy lilac colour ; the other is 

 Blonde Beauty, a sumptuous show flower, white, with rosy pink 



THE TUBEEOSE 



(rOLIANTHES TUBEBOSi). 



[HE Tuberose is a native of the East Indies ; it grows 

 more in the manner of an elegant carex than in the 

 ordinary fashion of a lily, and in fact belongs to the 

 Hemerocallis group of lilies, all of which throw up a 

 semi-grass-like tuft of leaves from a common centre, and 

 out of that centre the tuberose produces a tall green stem, sparely 

 beset with lax lanceolate light greeu leaves, and surmounted by 

 about twenty to forty most elegant flowers, which may be likened 

 to double hyacinths, with a very long greenish-white tube, extra 

 long and elegantly recurved segments, the substance thick and 

 wax-like, of the most pure ivory-white, and emitting a rich spicy 

 odour, so powerful that one flower will scent an apartment, and one 

 spike will diffuse a perceptible fragrance through a conservatory fifty 

 feet long — that is, if the flowers are open during sunny weather. 



Why attempt a description of this well-known plant ? Solely 

 because almost nobody knows it. Catch fifty gardeners at random, 

 and ask about the tuberose, and, if they speak true, forty-nine of 

 them will confess they have never seen it. It follows that forty-nine 

 have never grown it, or at all events never flowered it ; for you may 

 buv and grow bulbs for a lifetime, and never see the flowers. The 

 why and the wherefore of this is that a considerable proportion of all 

 the tuberose bulbs sold in England are not of flowering size; they 

 have no flowers in them when purchased, and it is very certain none 

 can come out. 



Let us just go back to the old plan. We used to order our bulbs 

 at Christmas, and wait for them. They came to hand about IsTew 

 Tear's Day, and we no sooner clutched them than they were potted 

 singly in 48-size, in a nice light fuchsia compost, and put on a tan 

 bed. They had a bottom-heat of 70 3 or thereabouts, with very little 

 water (a momentous point that) till they began to grow; then we 

 watered freely, and kept them growing. When the pots were full 

 of roots, we gave them a shift to the next size, or 32, and in that 

 size they were flowered. We kept them on the tan-bed, freely 

 watered, till the end of Ma} r , when the flower-spikes were well 

 advanced, and then they were staged, and had no help in the w*ay of 

 heat but such as the sun afforded them, which was always sufficient. 

 By the middle of June they were in full bloom. I always thought 

 that they flowered when they were not wanted; for in June and 

 July, when the tuberoses were at their best, we were overwhelmed 

 with flowers, and were glad enough when all the spikes of tuberoses 

 were cut — as they always were ; not one was allowed to wither in 



VOL. IV. — NO. I. 2 



