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of one year is provided more by the year or years that went 
before than by the present year may be interesting. If you take 
up a grape hyacinth now or a little later, you will often find the 
flower spike not only perfectly formed, but even coloured some 
months before it shows above ground. If you bisect a large fern, 
say a full grown filix mas in the summer, you will find no less 
than the growth of four years strongly shown; there are the 
+ outside fronds of last year ; there are the full grown fronds of this 
year ; at the top of the throat (if I may so call it) you will find 
the crown of next year’s fronds neatly curled up ; and below that 
_ you will find the crown of the fronds of the year after next closely 
packed but perfectly visible. The tulip bulb has something of 
the same character ; each bulb contains the flowering bulb of three 
years ; the old writers said that you could also find the flowers of 
three years, but that is not confirmed by modern observation. 
The main fact however remains that no plant and no living 
organism except annuals, and perhaps not even annuals, contains 
only the growth or the flower of one year only. 
Another lesson which I have learned from the weather of the 
‘years 1893-4 is the immense value of a hot dry summer. I knew 
the value of such a summer in ripening the wood, but I never 
sufficiently observed that the effect went much further, and 
especially in warming the ground. Though the frosts of last 
winter were severe for the short time they lasted they did very 
little mischief, and I put that down to the large amount of heat 
_ which was stored up in the earth during the long hot summer of 
last year. JI am sure that this is one great secret of the way in 
which half-hardy and even tender plants are grown successfully 
_in one garden and cannot be grown at all in a garden which may 
be a near neighbour. Soils vary greatly in the way in which 
they can take in and retain heat, and this partly depends on their 
position being sheltered or otherwise and well-drained, but far 
more on their constituent parts ; a loose friable loam, especially on 
sandstone, with a gravelly subsoil will absorb and keep an amount 
