THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 39 



bulbs, Lily of the Valley, Cinerarias, Pelargoniums, and all the usual 

 forced flowers of the season. 



The commoner flowers of the year make as good arrangements 

 as the rare and high-priced Orchids and hot-house flowers. Nothing 

 can excel the effect of the Rose or the Iris. Dahlias, Gladioli, Gera- 

 niums, Fuchsias, Stocks, Asters, and in fact all the common summer 

 bedding plant?, are excellent to cut from. Some of the hardy her- 

 baceous border flowers are really gems; for instance, the Aster 

 alpimis alba is just as good a white flower as we need wish for ; 

 while the Carnations, Picotees, and Pinks are the favourites of all 

 cut flower decorators ; Pentstemons, Antirrhinums, Sweet Williams, 

 and Phloxes are also good cutting flowers. And for winter table 

 decoration what could be better than the richly-coloured variegated 

 Scotch Kales; their beautiful crisped and curled leaves are the most 

 desirable and handy bits of foliage we can come at during the 

 winter months. Even the country lanes and hedgerows, nearly all 

 the year, abound with excellent materials for decorative purposes, 

 requiring only the hand of taste to arrange them properly. And 

 very interesting and pretty indeed is a vase tastefully filled with 

 the wild natural products of the woods and fields, and country 

 lanes. 



STOCKS FOR STANDARD ROSES. 



DIFFERENT roses require different stocks. A tree that 

 of itself would make a yard of wood in a season, is 

 confined and injured in its operations by having, 

 perhaps, a single bud upon it of some rare and tender 

 sort of rose, which makes but feeble and delicate shoots. 

 If left to itself under such circumstances, the extra sap would find 

 a speedy mode of escape, by sending forth innumerable shoots from 

 below the bud, and the bud would soon have but a bare subsistence: 

 Roses which are free growers, such as the Noisette, etc., will 

 generally be found to succeed better upon the wild stock than 

 others, their habits of growth being more assimilated. The wild 

 briars grow very late in the year, perhaps more so than almost any 

 other wild plant : and the free-growing bud avails itself of, instead 

 of checking, this propensity, and draws up the whole sap the 

 standard can produce; thus keeping up the full activity of the tree, 

 thriving and recovering a stagnant stem better, and being less 

 encumbered with suckers than delicate sorts. Comparatively speak- 

 ing, the White Moss, on the contrary, can hardly be kept alive when 

 grafted upon the briar. 



A<*ain, if a free-growing bud, such as the Noisette, Greville, 

 etc., were put upon a small stock, the bud would entirely drink up 

 the sap of the stock ; and instead of making a fine bushy head, 

 would either grow in one long shoot, or, at all events, make a small 

 and mean head, in comparison with what it would have done upon a 



February. 



