17G THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 



JUNE WORK IN THE ROSE GARDEN. 



HE possibility of planting roses in any week of the whole 

 year having been proved, we may now remind our readers 

 that this is as good a season as any for furnishing a 

 rosarium, though it is not usually so regarded or 

 described. There are many blights that affect the rose, 

 but the greatest of all is the nursery system of propagation. How 

 many of the roses planted last autumn are now poor scrubby things, 

 like worn-out mops, or puny imitations of dwarf bushes that refuse to 

 grow, and when their flowers appear it is with some twist of the bud 

 that indicates constitutional weakness. Nevertheless, for plants 

 carefully worked on young lusty briars or Manettis, and duly pinched 

 in when forming their first shoots, the autumn is the best time for 

 planting, because all winter the roots are at work, and a good summer 

 bloom is the proper result. But suppose a man with a passion for 

 roses has just made up his mind which of the new ones he will add 

 to his collection, or suppose a new garden where it has been 

 tremendous hard work for months past to get things in order, and 

 the season ordinarily used for planting has been lost, it is not too late 

 now to plant roses in either case, and we will venture to say that 

 under certain circumstances it is the best season of the whole year. 



There is one thing certain about roses planted in April and May 

 from nursery pots, and that is, that a good many always perish, though 

 there are few writers who have the courage to acknowledge it. 

 People order in so many of such and such roses. The plants arrive 

 in due course, and very shortly afterwards they are turned out to 

 take all chances of weather. They were perhaps worked on Manettis 

 during winter from forced plants and forced stocks, and to meet the 

 demand in spring were sent out before the junctiou of the two barks 

 had been fully effected, and being tender through having been 

 " pushed," they are quite unfit to endure the assaults of the weather 

 in cold ground, and with occasional morning frosts ; and, par con- 

 sequence, some of them die, some stand still a few weeks and then 

 grow with vigour, and some linger between life and death, and are 

 never worth the room they occupy. The Manetti is a good stock, but 

 it is made the worst by the system of forcing to which it is subject 

 in the nursery mode of propagating. The roses are manufactured to 

 sell, and about nine-tenths of them are very different to plants worked 

 in summer-time, on stocks in the open ground. When these die we 

 may blame the possessor ; when death happens to the pot plants sent 

 direct from an atmosphere of 70°, and warranted fit for immediate 

 planting out, we must blame the system by which they are manu- 

 factured and the strength driven out of the plant by stove treatment. 

 " But there are no others to be got," so says the rose amateur, 

 who burns to complete his lists of selected varieties, and to whom the 

 " new roses " are as important as the new fashion in bonnets to 

 a blushing belle. Unfortunately that is almost true; the new roses 

 are hurried into size for sale, and when sent out there is something of 

 a plant to look at, and very often much more to look at than the 



