DECEMBER. 279 



THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A POT-ROSE. 



Chap. IV. 



I AM PRUNED FOR EXHIBITION CONVEYED INTO THE EXHIBITION- 

 HOUSE TIED DOWN EXCITED TO GROW TIED OUT SHADED 



BLOOMED VISITORS MANETTI STOCK. 



And John did prune me ; for he said, as he cut quite half my 

 branches away, and shortened those he left to two or at most three 

 eyes, that I was one of that sort that required close pruning. But 

 when he had finished me, I saw him pass to my neighbour, who was 

 of a looser and more diffuse habit than myself, and with him, after 

 thinning out, he left from four to seven eyes on each shoot. As we 

 both grew and flowered well at the same time, he was no doubt right 

 in thus varying his practice. 



No sooner was I pruned, than I was carried with the rest into 

 the exhibition-house, a beautiful new structure reared expressly for 

 our use. There were twenty- four of us, for although only eight 

 were required at the show, I heard John say it was necessary to 

 have a large number, to make sure of eight being in full bloom on 

 the show-day. I was not a little proud of this improvement^ in my 

 position ; the house I now inhabited being so much finer than the 

 one in which I had lived the year before. It was a span-roofed 

 house, the faces looking towards the east and west. A double row 

 of hot-water pipes ran all round the interior ; the top-lights on one 

 side slid up and down, and all the side-lights were movable, to com- 

 mand a free supply of fresh air. 



It was early in December, about a fortnight after I had been 

 pruned and brought into the house, that the first signs of winter ap- 

 peared : it snowed very hard, and this brought John in-doors, not 

 that he cared for a little rough weather, but that he considered he 

 might, under such circumstances, be more usefully employed within. 

 He had a skein of bast in his hand, and began work by tying a 

 strong ligature of this material beneath the rim of the pot in which 

 I was. He then tied the ends of my strongest shoots, and brought 

 them down from the perpendicular position in which they grew to a 

 horizontal one, fastening the bast to that passed beneath the rim of 

 the pot. This operation wrought a curious change throughout my 

 whole system. The sap, which was just rising, and flowing strongly 

 towards the tops of my leading shoots, to the impoverishment of my 

 lower ones, was now more equally distributed, and I felt the benefit 

 of the change. As the winter proved unusually mild, no fire-heat 

 was applied till the first week in February, when it was thought 

 time to begin, in order to bloom me early in May. Hitherto I had 

 received abundance of air and but little water, that I might continue 

 in a state of rest. John came in one morning soon after artificial 

 heat was begun, and wrote up something in the interior of the house, 

 which almost every body who came in afterwards had the curiosity to 



