224 VILLA GARDENING . part ii 



moist sawdust. I have often laid-in the cuttings in bundles, and 

 when rooted taken them out and potted them. 



All Cuttings should be potted as soon as the roots are formed, 

 before they ramble off and get tightly embedded in the sawdust or 

 whatever is withm their reach. Such roots, on lifting up the cut- 

 tings, generally break off, and the plants have to begin work again ; 

 but if the cuttings are potted off when the little roots are about a 

 quarter of an inch long they receive no check. In all cases 

 the rooted cuttings must be placed in the hotbed till established in 

 their pots. Last spring I had a number of large Tea Roses in 

 pots which had been flowering all the winter, and which about 

 March had pretty well shot their bolt. They were cut down and 

 the branches made into cuttings, using up all the wood, both the 

 soft shoots and also the harder better-ripened wood. The cuttings, 

 when made, were planted thickly in a bed of warm moist sawdust. 

 Some of the cuttings from the soft points died from damp, but I do 

 not think one of the fairly firm and ripe shoots failed to grow. We 

 had plants enough to fill a long border, and most of them flowered 

 during the summer and all through the autumn ; in fact I cut 

 buds half expanded from Hom^re and Souvenir d'un Ami on 

 Christmas day. 



CHAPTER XIV 



The Unheated Plant -House. — By the exercise of ingenuity, 

 a very great deal may be done in a glasshouse without arti- 

 ficial heat. The larger the structure the less fluctuation in the 

 temperature, but it would be easy to improvise some covering 

 for small greenhouses whereby in winter the usual ran of green- 

 house plants may be kept in safety without the necessity of 

 going out on a cold frosty night to attend to the greenhouse fire. 

 I remember that nearly twenty years ago a friend of mine, Mr. 

 H. Howlett, invented a system of covering houses in cold weather, 

 to economise fuel and prevent the atmosphere on a cold night 

 from being scorched and roasted by hot pipes and flues. If I 

 remember rightly it was called the " Louvre protector," and in 

 the model exhibited was fixed on the roof outside the house. It 

 was fashioned like a Venetian blind with strips of zinc, only instead 

 of drawing up and down, as the Venetian blind does, the strips of 

 zinc could be elevated at pleasure, so that they stood at right 

 angles to the roof ; or they could be dropped dow^n flat, when they 

 formed a continuous metal covering enclosing a body of air, several 

 inches in depth, between the covering and the roof, and it is this 



