THE 



GARDENER. 



AUGUST 1873. 



A FEW BEMAKKS ABOUT HOTHOUSES. 



EXT in importance to a site for a garden is that of the 

 position of hothouses. The position in which hothouses 

 are placed in relation to the surface of a garden, and to 

 other offices in connection with a garden establishment, is 

 of very great importance, from both a cultural point of view and the 

 ease and efficiency with which all the operations connected with the 

 culture of plants and fruit can be carried on. 



Although the ordinary architecture of fruit and plant houses is not 

 by any means ornamental — and the less so and more simple they are 

 in their construction the better as a rule they are adapted for plant 

 and fruit culture — yet the appearance of a range of glass-houses, even 

 in relation to a vegetable and fruit garden, is a point which should not 

 be ignored so utterly as it has been in even the most pretentious gar- 

 dens. Indeed, next to the seeming perversity in choosing a site for 

 the garden itself, is the higgledy-piggledy manner in which glass-houses 

 have been scattered about, as if they had been abstracted in an " in- 

 considerate rage " from a Pandora's box, and scattered about to create 

 the best, or rather worst confusion, and to be as inconveniently heated 

 and difficult and laborious in their management as possible. We 

 could refer to numerous illustrations of defective arrangement not only 

 in choosing the locality of hothouses, but in the relation in which they 

 have been placed the one to the other. And some of these illustra- 

 tions, strange to say, might be got from establishments of a purely 

 commercial character, where glass-houses are erected to grow fruit and 



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