Gt PICTORIAL PRACTICAL ROSH GROWING. 
ae not in themselves prevent people from spoiling Rose 
ushes. 
There are many thousands of Roses in this world that are 
not pruned half enough, and there are nearly as many that 
are pruned far too much. Roses go unpruned because 
Angelina “can’t bear to cut the poor things about.” They 
are overpruned because the man at the show told Edwin that 
the way to get good Roses was to prune ’em, and no half 
measures about it neither. | 
Feminine humanity joins with masculine in agreeing that 
finger-nails must be trimmed. True, aristocratic China leaves 
one nail untrimmed, but it really finds it very inconvenient. 
Roses must be cut. If the knife is never used upon the bushes 
they will be as troublesome as the unpruned nail of the Son 
of Heaven. 
Do we get more or fewer flowers by pruning Roses? Fewer 
certainly, at one particular season. An uncut bush grows to 
a great size. If the soil in which it is growing suits it, the 
tree throws up a great many branches, and on these form a 
large number of shoots, some comparatively long, others mere 
twigs, but all, or nearly all, capable of producing flowers of 
a sort. Oh, yes! We will admit at once that non-pruning 
means a great many more flowers open at what we consider 
orthodox Rose time than pruning. But this conceded, we pro- 
ceed to “get our own back” in two ways—(1) by claiming, 
which we can do with confidence, that the pruned bush gives 
better successional crops than the unpruned one; (2) the 
flowers are more intellectually satisfying, because they are 
larger, and have finer form, greater substance, and richer colour. 
With the growth of Rose shows, the temptation to push 
hard pruning to its extreme limits in order to get a few flowers 
of abnormal size became too strong to be resisted. Rose bushes 
were pruned harder and harder: they gave larger and larger 
flowers: the hard pruner won more and more prizes, con- 
sequently he became regarded more and more as an authority: 
he wrote more and more articles and books. The whole order 
of events is perfectly natural, but it is not a bit less mis- 
chievous. To cut every Rose bush in the garden equally hard, 
regardless of its habit and relative degree of natural vigour, 
is on the same intellectual plane as cutting the hair of a 
charity school. 
It may be argued by the Rose writer that to give individual 
instructions for dealing with every one of the hundreds of 
varieties grown in gardens would be an impossible task. I 
agree. With a tolerably long lst in my own garden, and a 
long, long string in other gardens with which I have had to do, I am 
well able to appreciate the force of the argument. No writer can show, 
without an interminable array of illustrations, the exactly very best 
way of pruning every Rose grown. j 
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