oF - a 
e. . 
»* * LAYERS. 47 
thought necessary to remove it, be slipped off the parent and planted 
like a rodted cutting. As, however, the nourishment it can expect to 
derive from its own resources will be at first much less than what it 
obtained from its parent, it is customary, when a sucker is removed, 
to cut in its head, to prevent the evaporation from its leaves being 
greater than its roots can supply food for. Sometimes, when the pa- 
rent is strong, part of the horizontal root to which the sucker was 
attached is cut off and planted with the young plant 
Suckers of another kind spring up from the collar of the old plant, 
and when removed are always slipped or cut off with the fibrous 
roots that they may have made, attached. Offsets are young bulbs 
which form by the side of the old one, and merely require breaking 
off, and planting in rich light soil. Runners are shoots springing 
from the crown or collar of the plant, which throw out roots at their 
joints ; and which only require dividing from the parent plant, and 
replanting in good soil, to make new plants. 
Layers——Many plants, when kept in a moist atmosphere, having 
a tendency to throw out roots from their joints, the idea of making 
layers must have very early occurred to gardeners. When the roots 
are thrown out naturally wherever a joint of the shoot touches the 
moist earth, (as is the case with some of the kinds of verbena, which 
only require pegging down to make them form new plants,) layers 
differ very little from runners; but layers, properly so called, are 
when the art of the gardener has been employed to make plants 
throw out roots when they would not have done so naturally. The 
most common method of doing this is to cut half through, and slit 
upwards, a shoot from a growing plant, putting a bit of twig or pot- 
sherd between the separated parts; and then to peg down the shoot, 
so as to bury the divided joint in the earth; when the returning sap, 
being arrested in its progress to the main root, will accumulate at the 
joint, to which it will afford such abundance of nourishment, as to 
induce it to throw out a mass of fibrous roots, and thus to convert 
the shoot beyond it into a new plant, which may be separated from 
the parent, and transplanted. 
The only art required in layering is to contrive the most effectuat 
means of interrupting the returning sap, so as to produce as great 
an accumulation of it as possible, at the joint from which the roots 
are to be produced. For this purpose, sometimes, instead of cutting 
the branch half through, a ring of bark is taken off, care being taken 
