210 



JOUBNAL OF HOBTICULTUllE AND COTTAGE GABDENEB. 



[ B«pt«mber 28, 1869. 



\s'C bare 20 feet, a good width, but not too wide. Tlie glasD on 

 both Bides should reach down to the shelves. A hundred-feet 

 length of glass of this sort might be divided into three com- 

 partments — one to be kept at between oo° and tiu' at night, 

 and from 05° to 70° by day, with a rise of li>' from sun heat ; 

 the second to be kept 10' lower; and the third to be kept at 

 from -10° to 45° at night, 5' higher by day, and 10° or 15° higher 

 ou iluo days. A house of this desoriplion would be a great 

 advance on the present system of spoiling the ordinary occu- 

 pants of our greenhouses and hothouses by there maintaining 

 the temperatures required for forcing plants. The plants ore 

 brought from a position much colder than that in which they 

 aro placed, they swell their buJs, make weak growths, aud 

 form badly-flowered specimens. lu all the three divisions I 

 woiUd have means of afi'oruiug bottom heat, for it is quite ns 

 necessary in the cool house as in the warmer, to give newly- 

 potted plants a start at the roots before they are excited at top. 

 The means for giving bottom heat should ba such that they 

 could be worked separately from the system for top heat, or 

 together, as might ba necessary. The bottom heat in the cool 

 house would be valuable for plants lilted from the open ground, 

 potted, and at once placed in-doors for forcing ; for by plung- 

 ing the pots in the bed with a temperature 5° or 10' higher 

 than that of the atmosphere new roots would speedily form, 

 aud wo should have them better prepared to cater for the 

 swelling buds ; after a time these would puEh more strongly 

 and more certainly. If the plants had been established in 

 pots, and these were fnll of healthy roots, and therefore not 

 needing bottom heat, it would be easy to sot them on the 

 plunging material instead of placing them in it. 



Tne cool house would be sufficient for forcing every kind of 

 hardy shrub or plant for three weeks. At the end of that time 

 the plant could be placed in the next warmer division for 

 another three weeks, aud if wanted to bloom at once might be 

 placed in the warmest house of all, where it would soon flower ; 

 but the second house would be sufficient forcing for many 

 liardy plants. The hottest house would be very serviceable for 

 bringing forward a class of plants that need a temperature 

 intermediate between that of a stove and greenhouse, and for 

 plants which, from requiring more moisture than the regular 

 occupants of the stove, cannot well be bloomed there in winter. 



The houses used for forcing could be employed for Amines in 

 summer, which could be kept while at rest in covered boxes 

 along the sides, or by using moveable sides, as described in 

 '• Sanders on the Vine." They might also be employed for 

 Melons, Cucumbers, and a variety of other purposes. — G.'Abbet. 



SEEDLING KOSES. 



We have had in " our Journal " two or three letters lately, 

 complaining that the cultivation of seedling Boses has, to use 

 the words of the writers, " got into a rut," by which the writers 

 mean that oar new seedlings exhibit no decided novelty, but 

 are almost without exception repetitions, or at most but slight 

 improvements, of long-existing varieties. 



There are two questions arising from this fact, the truth of 

 •which wo all allow. The first in, Is this more true of Eoses 

 than of any other flowers which have been long cultivated ? 

 Every florists' flower of which seedlings are raised by hundreds 

 and thousands, must after a certain time arrive at a stage in 

 which improvement is only possible in one of two ways ; either 

 by gradual degrees, the seedlings still retaining the impress of 

 their parents — f rr the most usual mode ; — or, more rarely, by 

 the uuexpected appearance of some new quality, or, at least, 

 remarkable advance in perfection. The former is the case 

 with ninety-nine out of a hundred of our novelties, whose 

 novelty, indeed, is in most cases their only recommendation ; 

 in others, however, the advance is certain, though slight ; and 

 so it is that with Eoses, as with other flowers, ten years or so 

 will find us with flowers not much diiiering in class, yet much 

 improved in those characters which we require. 



With Bases, if I mistake not, the advance in this -way has 

 been more rapid than with other florists' flowers. I am not a 

 gixiwer of Dahlias or Auriculas, but the former do not seem to 

 me very different at exhibitions from those I used to see in 

 my long-past undergraduate days at Widuali's, of Cambridge, 

 nor the latter from those that filled the shed in the garden 

 opposite my old school ; while this distance of time, nearer 

 thirty than twenty years, has made an entire revolution in the 

 character and quality of our Roses. And although we may be 

 sometimes impatient when we see the new Hoses of one vear 



difloring so little from those of the year before, and after grow- 

 ing our expensive aequisitioDS for a year or two, may indulge 

 in a hearty growl when we consign the majority to the rnbbiab- 

 heap ; stiU, anyone who can compare his list at present with 

 that of a few years past, will see that his collection has im- 

 proved much, even though many of his recent acquisitions 

 have by no means equalled the glowing description given o£ 

 them in the lists whence they have been selected. 



Occasionally, however, by no chance, yet in some way which 

 we cannot comprehend, an absolutely new Rose is originated — 

 a liose which not only makes a sensation when introduced, bat 

 gives rise to a new race. Thus the Noisette Bone, which we 

 call a chance seedling, has been the parent of all that class and 

 of many of our Tea-scented, the Bose dn Boi of our Hybrid 

 Perpetuals, and so forth, the parent being not so much an 

 improvement on the grandparent as a sport from it. And in 

 our time we have seen this process at work, but, as might be 

 expected, only at rare intervals. Some twenty-five years ago 

 Guant des Batailles made its appearance among a host of doll- 

 coloured Hybrid Perpetuals ; then General Jacqueminot was, 

 perhaps, as great a stiide; then Gloire de Dijon, and more 

 recently, Marechal Kiel, each of these scarcely foreshadowed 

 by previous flowers, and each destined to be the founder of a 

 more or less extensive family. These are, however, necessarily 

 few and far between, and in the intervals when we are waiting 

 for them, what can the growers do but improve the families 

 which we already possess ? Here the grower of Ruses has a great 

 advantage over his fellows ; he is not practically such a slave 

 to fancy-points as others. Let a Dahlia have notched petals, a 

 green eye, or an irregular outline, however fine it may be in 

 other respects, no grower wili keep it, were it even the long- 

 desired " blue D.ihlia " which we used to be promised in 

 country newspapers in the days when I was young. But the 

 most formal of all our fanciers keeps in his garden such Boses 

 as Eugene Appert aud General Jacqueminot, deficient thoagh 

 they be in some one or other of those points on which he will 

 insist as necessary. He abuses them, but he keeps them on, 

 and admires them ; and a Bose, though it may fall short of 

 perfection in one or two poiuts, yet if it be either new-high or 

 new-delicately-colouref), and free to flower and open, will always 

 have its admirers, auJ, more important to the raiser, its pur- 

 chasers. 



StiU, if we are in a rut aud wish to get out of it, the reason 

 is simple enough, and a guess may be made at a remedy. 

 Seedlings are raised in abundance from our best known and 

 most prized Roses, and only those are retained which are abso- 

 lutely good — at least, good enough to sell — while all the rest 

 are destroyed, quite irrespectively of any special peculiarities 

 which they may show, and no one, if I mistake not, ever thinks 

 of retaining a Rose as a breeder which is not worth retention 

 for sale ; and so it is quite possible that plants which have 

 shown a tendency to be the parents of yellow Hybrid Per- 

 petuals, striped Teas, itc, have perished, because they were 

 not good enough for sale, and no one cared to keep them to 

 see what their seed would produce. 



One of your contributors told us, among other matters, last 

 autumn, that he had a quantity of seeds of Souvenir de Dr. 

 Jamain. Here is a case in point. The Rose is third-rate— 

 with me, at least, small and not full, but the colour quite a 

 novelty, and were I inclined to foretell our next sensation, I 

 should pitch upon a good seedling of Dr. Jamain as likely to 

 cause it. This will be a step out of the rut. 



But in the meantime let me ask our seedling growers 

 whether it would not be worth their while to save as stock 

 peculiar Roses, good or bad, for the chance of raising from 

 them seedlings preserving their peculiarities, and snrpaesing 

 them in quality. 



We certainly want change — improvement we have, not very 

 rapid, but still marked and evident. We cannot expect to have 

 good novelties constantly, but more might be done if we were 

 less contented to choose as parents of our seedlings Boses 

 which have been parents of thonsauds of seedlings before. — 



DUCKWISO. 



GOLDEN CHAlinON GRVPE. 

 TuEBE is a general complaint in this neighbourhood abont 

 the growth and progress of the above Vine, and if I may judge 

 by my own experience of it, the complaints are not made with- 

 out a just cause. Like myself, everyone complains of its weak 

 growth and debilitated appearance, which aro quite different 

 from the description, or even from what the appearance of the 



