38 APRIL 



wards they should give large quantities of flowers 

 from October onwards. 



The first sowing of cinerarias for the winter is now 

 being made, and cuttings of fibrous-rooted begonias 

 are being struck. This necessity of forethought 

 is generally supposed by persons who are not 

 gardeners to be an intolerable nuisance, but it is in 

 reality one of the joys of floriculture ; the flowers 

 are so much the more one's children if one has 

 cherished them and loved them before they had 

 their birth. And forethought for a season twelve 

 months hence is no more difficult than forethought 

 for the near summer, when once the gardener has 

 lived in the routine of it. It would be as impossible 

 for him, or for her, to forget to strike winter zonal 

 pelargoniums in March as to ignore their flowers if 

 they are in bloom at that season. The very name 

 of the month suggests the culture of some plants, 

 just as it suggests the flowering of others ; and this 

 habit, once established and applied to each season 

 in succession, becomes a habit of devotion as well 

 as of necessity. April, for instance, suggests the 

 pruning of tea roses, the planting of gladioli, the 

 flowering of fritillaries, and a hundred other things 

 which never occur to the remembrance in July or 

 August or any other inapposite month. The 

 experienced gardener has no need of a calendar 

 to remind him of each season's work, for each is its 

 own remembrancer and sufficient unto itself for the 

 purpose. But it is the most experienced who will 

 have such fear of forgetting that he will renew his 

 memory and give it artificial support by the aid of 

 the garden diary. 



