WATEKINa TEANSPLANTED TEEES 



BY THOMAS MEEHAN, GERMANTOWN, PHILADELPHIA. 



T is very customary with many horticultural magazines, to 

 sum up at the end of the season all the improvements 

 which may have been made in gardening during the 

 preceding year. This enables us to see at a glance how 

 }, much we have progressed, and how far we have left our 

 forefathers behind. Still it must have occurred to many 

 readers of these summaries, that our progress must have 

 been exceedingly slow if all we have been learned to 

 avoid or improve has been noticed in these retrospective 

 sketches. But the fact is, we have advanced faster than 

 our own journals have given us credit for. Ideas that 

 ai'e reallyj sound and valuable creep about amongst gardeners like ivy over old ruins, 

 till, once well established, no one knows when or by whom it was planted, or how 

 they originated. 



I was strongly reminded of this by reading in an old "Gardener's Calendar" the 

 following advice : " Should dry weather prevail, apply frequent waterings to all 

 newly transplanted trees and shrubs." I venture to say, that there are very few of 

 our many intelligent gardeners of the present day, who would give such advice ; and 

 yet it seems so reasonable that when a plant is likely to wilt, it umist require water, 

 that we cannot wondA- that the practice still extensively prevails. 



It is, therefore, a perfectly natural and legitimate enquii-y, that, " If we must not 

 water plants under such circumstances, what must we do to save them ?" The an- 

 swer will be best understood by being given in detail. 



That a plant must have a certain amount of moisture to enable it to live, is well 

 known to every one ; and that this moisture must be absorbed through the instru- 

 mentality of the fibres, or small rootlets, is a no less widely disseminated fact. 

 When a tree is ^^toell establislied" that is, has been growing for some time in a 

 given situation, the rootlets pierce the soil, so that they are in a manner encased by 

 it. In this position how easy it is for them to draw in their required supplies of 

 water. The communication between them and the soil is unbroken, and moisture 

 passes from one to the other by a process nearly akin to capillary attraction. How 

 important then that soil thrown in aroimd the roots at transplanting should be finely 

 pulverized, and that every means should be taken to induce it to enter every " hole 

 and corner." But with the greatest possible care, this can never be done to a 

 perfect degree. The soil will still have an opportunity to sinic ; that is, will be filled 

 with large air spaces; and whatever roots may be in these cavities, or air spaces, will 

 cither get dried up or injured. 



It is a first-rate plan, and one which, in critical cases, I have often employed to 

 dvantage, to fill the hole intended for the tree with water, throwing in soil enough 

 make it of the consistency of thin mortiir, into which the tree is put, and 



