SEPTEMBER 171 



degrees of frost will leave them unharmed. All 

 they ask is that their treatment shall be reasonably 

 careful, and I will give as shortly as possible the 

 rules I have found most convenient for potting and 

 flowering these valuable things under glass. 



There are many persons of limited means and 

 many also of large means who grudge the money 

 necessary for bulbs more than they grudge any 

 other garden expenditure. Bulbs are considered 

 an extravagance, and a gardener who spends a 

 sovereign or two on them is a wastrel in the last 

 degree. This feeling must be a survival of the 

 days not long departed when bulbs were a costly 

 luxury. This is not so now. Many beautiful things 

 can be had at a farthing apiece, or even less, and 

 I have bought good flowering bulbs of the lovely 

 daffodil Cynosure at exactly half that price. The 

 sooner the idea is abandoned that hardy bulbs in 

 the greenhouse are not for the ordinary grower the 

 better. There is nothing else in cultivation so suit- 

 able for the amateur in every respect, and for the 

 months of January and February they are indis- 

 pensable. There is nothing that can take their 

 place, although there are many things that may be 

 grown in addition to them. I am speaking to the 

 amateur who loves his garden, but has to be careful 

 in his expenditure, when I put forward regarding 

 this expenditure a word of advice. Reckon up 

 what yearly sum you spend or are prepared to 

 spend on your flower garden, whether in plants or 

 in seeds, and then let three-quarters of that sum be 

 laid out in bulbs for the greenhouse. If the garden 

 without is of the herbaceous order very few plants 



