The Canadian Horticulturist. 235 



any part, but preferably originating in the lower parts of the bushes, can be 

 utilized, avoiding crowding. All the wood removed should be cut out .cleanly, 

 none being left to form spurs, as in red and white currants, though short stubby 

 spurs which form naturally and have received light and air freely, must be 

 retained. Shortening the leading shoots need only be adopted to regulate the 

 size and symmetry of the bushes, but this is best effected by cutting out the 

 longest branches from time to time. — Tonic. 



NOTES ON THE LATE FROSTS. 



^HEN you ask me to write you a few notes on roses and their 

 behavior this season, it is clear to me that you have no proper 

 conception of what we have passed through in this up-country 

 since the winter left us. I might say that roses with us have had 

 no chance to behave this season. They are like the youngster at 

 school who said every time he tried to do his best, he got his 

 head snubbed off. On the tenth of May my roses wera trying to 

 do their best, and I never had such a promise for a magnificent blooming sea- 

 son. One week after there was not a leaf of living foliage on them, and so great 

 was the shock to them from the repeated frosts that many of my finest plants 

 have not recovered, and never will. Out of over a dozen strong Gen. Jacque 

 bushes I have but four sending out new shoots. Many other sorts still more 

 tender are totally dead. 



This may appear strange to you, but, when you remember that the County 

 of Perth occupies a very high altitude midway between the great lakes, and that 

 just here we are in a dip or slight depression on that high level, the first 

 stretches of the Thames valley, you can understand how every cold wave settles 

 down upon us with all its chilling distructiveness. On account of these topo- 

 graphical conditions which I have referred to, we are, I believe, more subject to 

 those low treacherous temperatures than any other section of Western Ontario. 

 I have not in any other section noticed the raspberry bushes so completely 

 destroyed as they are just about here. The Marlboro shot out again from the 

 canes, but the Golden Queen and Cuthbert canes are as dead as the wood of 

 last year. On fourteen plum trees and a like number of pear trees that I had 

 heavily loaded with blossom, I will not have fourteen specimens of fruit, and I 

 notice some branches of my Pond's Seedling plum trees have died away since 

 the foliage was destroyed. Among the gooseberries the Crown Bob seems to 

 have survived the best. The Whitesmith, Pearl, Industry, Ocean Wave, and 

 even the Conn, were quite destroyed. Of currants I had a promise of forty or 

 fifty pailsful before the frost, now I do not look for one. In short, I may write 

 of fruit and roses with me this year as the traditional Irish litterateur did when 

 asked to write a treatise on the snakes of Ireland. He summed up the whole 

 subject with the sentence, " there are no snakes in Ireland." Such, I am sorry 

 to say is the case with me, there is no fruit and no roses on my premises this 

 year. 



Mitchell. T. H. Race. 



