128 THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



wood is well-ripened in the autumn, and that is best accomplished by with- 

 holding water and letting them hare plenty of sun. 



Roses. — D. W. C. — It is certainly too late to plant standards in the ordinary 

 way, but, if extra care is taken, they may be planted any time this month, but the 

 earlier the better. If you plant now let them be hard pruned, and kept liberally 

 watered all the summer. 



Mosses in a Febneby. — Isabella Bruce. — Sandy peat, fragments of sand- 

 stone and limestone, rotten wood and broken bricks, are the materials on which 

 mosses are most likely to flourish. The place should be shady, and should be 

 watered with artificial showers all the summer. A rockery so treated will pro- 

 duce its own crop of mosses in time ; the places where they show themselves 

 should not be disturbed. Sphagnum is a moss that abounds in most boggy places, 

 and generally grows in spots where it is covered with about two inches of water 

 all the winter, in sappy unsafe ground. It is a grey moss, of coarse texture, very 

 distinct in character, and when bitten between the teeth yields a bitter taste. 



Holly. — RocMands. — Your variegated holly should be pruned at once, but it 

 will require great care. You should not have allowed it to go unpruned for so 

 long, and it would not have become so open and naked. Take a view of the tree, 

 so as to have in your mind exactly the sort of form you would wish it to grow 

 to. First cut in every branch that extends beyond the general circumference, 

 using a small sharp saw and a good knife. In cutting back the rambling 

 branches, take them off, if possible, above a fork. By leaving two short snaggs 

 of about an inch beyond the fork, you will get three breaks at least. In places 

 where there are large openings between the branches, cut them back on each 

 side about half their length, and let every cut be just above a cut or fork, as the 

 holly has always dormant buds at the base of a fork. The hard wood must be 

 cut with a fine saw, and smoothed over with a sharp knife. After pruning, 

 syringe the tree frequently during dry weather, not morning and evening only, 

 but any time whenever you can spare five minutes ; but do not water the root 

 at all. 



Cotton Plant. — Amateur. — The best cotton plant for ornamental purposes 

 is Oossypium hirsutum, a biennial shrub which grows like a currant-bush and 

 flowers profusely. Having raised the plants in a hot-bed, pot them singly in 

 small pots in light rich soil, and re-place in the hot-bed. When they have filled 

 the pots with roots, shift to thirty-two size pots, and plunge in heat again, keep- 

 ing them at an average of sixty-five degrees — say, sixty degrees by night and 

 seventy degrees by day. In June place them in a sunny greenhouse, and at the 

 end of July shift to twenty-four or eighteen size pots, using equal parts of loam, 

 rotten dung, and sharp sand. Winter them in the coolest part of the stove, and 

 keep rather dry. While growing they require abundance of water. 



Onion Geub. — A correspondent writes as follows: — For mauy years past I 

 have been sadly tormented by the onion grub. In some seasons they have 

 destroyed my whole crop, but the two last seasons I have been quite free from 

 them by using the following mixture : — To a barrowful of dry sawdust mix two 

 quarts of coal tar; mix them thoroughly, so that the sawdust may be quite 

 blackened by the ccal tar, and have the appearance of soot. In the beginning 

 of May I sow the above quantity over four beds, 30 feet long by 3ft feet broad. 

 It is not at all injurious to the young onions. I suppose it is the smell of the 

 coal tar that banishes the onion fly, as I have had fine healthy crops since using 

 the above precaution. 



