38 



THE GARDENERS' MONTHLY 



[February, 



Pa., asks : ■' Gan you tell me how to raise plants 

 of a rose we value very much ? We know noth- 

 ing of grafting or budding, but suppose the plant 

 can be raised from slips, though some put in last 

 year did not grow." 



[Sometimes cuttings of wood taken before the 

 leaves push, planted in a shady place, but not a 

 dry place, will grow, but more certainly if planted 

 in fall and kept from severe frost. Most lady 

 gardeners, who have no greenhouse, would put 



these pots of autumn planted rose cuttings in a 

 room window, and get them to do very well. 

 Some amateurs have excellent success by taking 

 the young growth when half mature, and placing 

 them in saucers of mushy sand, and setting them 

 in the full sun. Half ripened wood is generally 

 relied on by florists for rose propagation. If the 

 plants have been grown under glass, cuttings 

 from them seem to root more easily than when 

 grown wholly in the open air. — Ed. G. M.] 



Greenhouse and House Gardening. 



SEASONABLE HINTS. 



Plant culture, as an art, has scarcely kept pace 

 with other departments of gardening. A fine, and 

 really well grown specimen plant, is too frequently 

 the work of time or circumstances, rather than the 

 plant-grower's skill. Very few persons, indeed, 

 start out deliberately to grow a good specimen 

 plant ; and, indeed, the knowledge of the great 

 pleasure there is in good plant growing, has been 

 nearly lost to mankind. The plant growers of 

 the last generation had much more of these horti- 

 cultural pleasures than we. Perhaps they overdid 

 the thing, and the lampooners got alter them and 

 destroyed the whole thing. It was, indeed, a rare 

 old sight to see the old plant grower's potting shed. 

 There were as many compartments for all sorts of 

 special soils and manures as drawers and boxes 

 in an apothecary's shop, and the prescriptions for 

 successful plant growing were no less curiosities — 

 an eighth of this, a sixteenth of the other, a thirty- 

 second of something else, with perhaps a pinch of 

 some soil condiment and a shake of another, like 

 salt and pepper in the old cook books, set forth 

 the essential conditions of success. It was all too 

 good to be true, to the more careless moderns. 

 Now, they get any sort of earth, put a little manure 

 and sand to lighten it ; and this is potting soil. If 

 any plant likes it, well and good; if not, in the 

 classical language of the school-yard, they may 

 "lump if," and this is the end of all. But there is 

 no doubt that all plants have peculiar tastes, 

 which we may pander to if we will that they 

 should do their best. Some have a sweet tooth 

 for goodies, and others prefer what a good set of 



molars could prepare. Some call for cafe /ait, 

 others for ca/i noir ; here one expects a puree of 

 something or another, while the other can be put 

 off with corn beef and potatoes without a sigh. Of 

 course you can grow a plant in "any good soil" 

 as the flower books tell us, but the plant grower 

 will find what it pays in pleasure to remember, that 

 they have odd whims a"nd queer fancies as well as 

 other living things ; and as with other living 

 things, we get the most out of them when we 

 humor them. 



In the potting of plants there is much to study 

 as well as in the soil. Plants like it fresh — that is, 

 fresh soil. To grow a plant well we must pot it 

 often. If we put a small plant into a large pot, 

 ten to one the leaves will get yellow after awhile, 

 unless the plant be some rank growing, weedy 

 thing. The roots rot — that is, the feeding roots 

 rot — gardeners say, the soil sours. To guard 

 against this, as soon as the little pot is full of roots, 

 it is put into a larger one — one but just large 

 enough to get a little more earth between the old 

 ball and the new pot. In a few weeks we go at 

 it again, and so we continue every few weeks, so 

 that before the season is over a plant that started 

 in a 3-inch pot finds itself in a six or more, and 

 when it is so grown manure water does not hurt 

 the plant; it rather enjoys and laughs over it. We 

 cannot do this with the little plant in the large pot; 

 manure water then makes the sour soil still sourer, 

 and the end soon comes. Oh ! how glorious used 

 to be the old-fashioned Pelargoniums— Martha 

 Washington we believe is the American name — 

 grown on some such plan as we have dotted out. 

 Plants in six months two feet high and two feet 



