290 



JOtJBNAL OF HOBTICULTUEE AND COTTAGE GARDENEB. 



[ April 9, 1874. 



growB in houses ; and it is reasonable to suppose that such is 

 the case, becanse they are grown more naturally. 



The next method of cultivating Mushrooms which I will 

 just toach npon is that of growing them in boxes, pots, 

 hampers, or any other large vessel that will hold the materials 

 together and bear ths pressure of being jammed in firm. 

 Where no better convenience exists for producing Mushrooms 

 in winter these will be found useful contrivances, and may be 

 worked successfully and in conjunction with the beds in the 

 cool sheds to produce gatherings when these beds run short, 

 taking care to put them in dry warm places — in back sheds of 

 the hothouses, or under the stages of such structures, in warm 

 cellars, or any other place where they will be free from cold 

 and damp ; from these vessels being easily moveable, they can, 

 if going wrong, be taken to a temperature more suitable to 

 growth. 



Wherever Mushrooms are grown it is necessary, in order to 

 insure success, to guard against overheating and too much mois- 

 ture, either of which in excess would ruin the chances of a crop. 

 Not so if the beds become too dry. The action of the spawn is 

 certainly considerably retarded, but it is not destroyed; for 

 when the necessary warmth and moisture are applied the spawn 

 begins to run, and Mushrooms soon appear. The more com- 

 pact the beds are made the more regular will be their heat, 

 the stronger and more evenly will the spawn work, the more 

 substantial will be the Mushrooms ; and the more they are 

 exposed to the air, consistently with their requirements, the 

 better the flavour will be. When the spawn has once commenced 

 to work in a bed, whether it is in a cellar or any other place, 

 the temperature should never be allowed to fall below 4.5" ; 

 that was the heat of the bed which produced those Mushrooms 

 I brought before you on one or two occasions, and the bed 

 has now been spawned for over six months. The tempe- 

 rature of the room in which they were grown has been allowed 

 to range from 45° to 55°, and when the little Mushrooms 

 showed themselves through the soil on the bed the tempera- 

 ture was advanced a few degrees (but never once exceeded 55°) 

 by placing a heap of heating material on the floor of the room, 

 not having any other means of applying it. — Thomas Record. 



[Mr. Record is an excellent authority on Mushroom-culture. 

 The Mushrooms he exhibited at the Royal Horticultural So- 

 ciety on March 18th were the finest we ever saw, and for them 

 he was awarded a first prize in a severe competition. — Eds.] 



ELECTION OF EOSES. 



In reply to " E. L. W., Yeovil" I may say that I do not 

 think he will be disappointed in the Roses that came out at 

 the top in the late election. Of course if " E. L. W." expects 

 them to be perfection he will be so, becanse the best of us, like 

 the Roses, are deficient in some quality. Would, I say for 

 myself, that, like so many of the Roses, it were only in one. 

 " E. L. W." must remember that our friend Mr. Radclyffe 

 does not like and dislike lukewarmly, and so he either clings 

 to a Rose in spite of everyone else — perhaps for the very good 

 and satisfactory reason that the identical Rose responds kindly 

 to his tender watching, or he discards it in toto and without 

 any suving clause. There is no possible reason why we should 

 not have our likes and dislikes in Roses ; and our friend Mr. 

 Radclyffe dislikes Andre Dunand ; but we are deficiant in light 

 Roses, and so I fancy it will be an acquisition, and certainly I 

 have seen it very beautiful. At any rate, it is rather hard to 

 discard a Rose because it comes badly one season. I hazard 

 the opinion that both this Rose and Lyonnais will as a rule be 

 fit for the stand only in their early stages ; I am afraid, else, 

 that they will stare the judges out of countenance. 



My experience of Edward Morren agrees far more with 

 " E. L. W." than with Mr. Radclyffe. I have seen many such 

 complete failures of this Rose that I sometimes doubt whether 

 I shall succeed with it ; but stiU I hope on, and reflect how 

 often our first impressions of our fellow men are erroneous, 

 and therefore it is hard to judge a Rose at once. I cannot 

 help feeling that " simply miserable " applied to any Roses 

 that have not had a few years' trial on our shores and become 

 pretty fairly established, is rather too sweeping. — Joseph 

 HiNTON, Warminster. 



that if the frost does come and cat them after they are np it 

 does not do them much harm — in fact, he has found that those 

 which were the most forward suffered the least. Their tops 

 have been blackened, but there have always been green leaves 

 left unhurt lower down. This was notably the case in the 

 great frost on the night of the " Derby-day" three or four years 

 ago, and in the frosts of last spring. Secondly, his Potatoes 

 always are ripe by the 18th of August, and this is the great 

 advantage of early planting. If " L.4ncaster Amatedk" will 

 procure Messrs. Sutton & Sons' Spring Catalogue and Ama- 

 teur's Guide for 1874 he will find on page 9, amongst the work 

 to be done in February, the following excellent remarks, which 

 exactly bear out what " H. G. M." has been saying : — " Pota- 

 toes may be planted in quantity ; if the first early growth of 

 haulm is destroyed by frost, it is soon renewed, and in the end 

 the crop is little the worse for it. Potato disease usually 

 breaks out in autumn " [generally in the end of July. — 

 H. G. M.] " and therefore early planting is a safe panacea, 

 for it insures early ripening of the crop, and consequently it 

 is ripe and harvested before the time when the disease occurs," 

 or at any rate the haulm may be cut off, and the Potatoes dug 

 with care. The Potatoes which " H. G. M." grew last year 

 were Ash-leaved Kidneys, Haye's Kidney, Bresee's Peerless, 

 Early Rose, Dalmahoy, and Red-skinned Flourball. 



PEOTECTING POTATOES. 



" H. G. M., Guildford," has no difficulty in replying to the 



' Lancaster Amateur's " two questions on page 282. First, 



ho never " protects them from the weather;" but he has found 



cuEious foemation of gladiolus COEMS. 



I SEND you herewith a curious case of bulb-formation in the 

 Gladiolus which I happened to meet with when visiting my 

 friend Mr. Banks at Sholden Lodge, near Deal. He is well 

 known as one of the largest amateur growers of this beautiful 

 autumn flower, and we often chat together over the mishaps 

 and successes we meet with in our cultures. He brought for- 

 ward this root as an instance of the freaks we meet with. He 



had some old bulbs, which 

 he did not plant last season, 

 in an empty flower pot, and 

 on the top of the pot were 

 these two bulbs. It will be 

 seen by the engraving that 

 they have formed, in one 

 instance at least, a perfect 

 corm, without throwing out 

 any roots or having contact 

 with any moisture. I know 

 it is not unusual to see such 

 things in the Potato and other tubers, but it is, I believe, 

 quite unusual to see so perfectly formed a corm produced 

 under such a condition. It will account for what X have fre- 

 quently noticed in the planting of spawn. I have been sur- 

 prised to find that in places where there were gaps, yet when 

 I dug up the ground I found corms larger than the small ones 

 I had planted ; and I gather from the example now before me 

 that something of the same kind had gone on underneath 

 the ground, and that a fresh corm had been produced in an 

 abnormal state of things. — D., Deal. 



THE BEAUTIFUL AND USEFUL INSECTS OF 

 OUE GAEDENS.— No. 18. 

 Some persons, as I am told, are desirous to set on foot a 

 new plan of treating the pursuit of entomology, and, indeed, 

 the other branches of natural science. While, on the one 

 hand, dry technicalities are to be carefully shunned, on the 

 other hand all twaddle is to be repudiated, and the naturalist, 

 if, indeed, he is still to take that name, is to pursue his par- 

 ticular fancy with the business- like air of the man who plays 

 at billiards or cricket. Now, though I strongly object to senti- 

 mentalism, I should be sorry to see a generation of ento- 

 mologists arise to whom collecting and rearing insects was an 

 employment stripped of all poetic accessories. It is exceedingly 

 doubtful if the man who goes in for the study of Nature, and 

 means to exclude the imaginative altogether, and treat hia 

 hobby in a muscular manner, will gain anything by it beyond 

 the simple effect of his being employed. He might almost as 

 well be breaking stones by the roadside, or casting-up in- 

 terminable sums. And, no doubt, in this age of iron we are 

 all of us much in danger of hardening whatever we touch — we 

 have a Midas-like property, but tending towards a different 

 result. It is gratifying to find, that in the case of horticul- 

 ture, however, there are many who, though very familiar with 

 the choicest vegetable forms of all lands as displayed in our 



