8 THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



In purchasing any of these roses, take the hest care possible to 

 obtain them upon brier stocks or their own roots, for Manettis will 

 not do at all, and briers are scarcely to be desired. If they are on 

 their own roots you will have the power at any time to compel them 

 to renew themselves from the very base, by the simple process of 

 cutting them down, and this may be desirable some day. If upon 

 any stock you will have no such power, because if you are driven to 

 an act of amputation for the purpose of renewing the tree, the 

 stock will immediately send up a host of suckers, and contend for its 

 own renewing at the expense of the rose. I should prefer to put 

 out strong plants from pots in April for the clothing of a wall, and 

 I would buy them two or three months in advance, and keep them in 

 a pit until within three or four weeks of the time of planting, when 

 to prepare them they should be put in the open air in a sheltered 

 spot. 



To describe the mode of planting would be to waste the space at 

 our command. But I shall say this, that I would not prune away one 

 inch of any climbing rose at the time of planting, but would spread 

 out all the shoots, and train them carefully, even if I did not mean 

 to keep one of them. By this procedure I should secure a free 

 growth of the roots, and this would constitute the foundation of 

 success. In the following month of April I should probably cut 

 them back severely, perhaps leaving only one shoot its full length, 

 and removing all the rest by cutting close over the roots. The 

 result would be several strong shoots from the bottom, from which I 

 should select the strongest and best placed and suppress the others. 

 Probably in the April following I should cut iiway the shoot left 

 originally for a fair beginning, having now better wood to take its 

 place, and a tree so vigorous that at any time it would send up new 

 shoots from the base at the word of command. I put this procedure 

 as a probability, because it would not profit the reader to lay down 

 strict rules. But it may be well to direct attention to the fact that 

 the first growth of climbing plants of all kinds is necessarily weak, 

 and never does acquire such robustness as will be found in shoots 

 subsequently thrown up from the roots. Therefore in all probability 

 the course of treatment above sketched out would be the best in 

 any ninety out of a hundred instances, but the last one might afford 

 exception to the rule. As to pruning in general, and some other 

 matters of importance, we must defer what we have to say until next 

 month. In case, however, this chapter should appear incomplete if 

 I omit entirely to refer to the pruning, I shall close it by saying that 

 climbing roses of all kinds require but little systematic pruning, and, 

 generally speaking, if never pruned at all, would grow and flower 

 more freely than if hacked about by an unskilful hand. 



S. H. 



