THE AMATEUR^S 



GREENHOUSE AND CONSERVATORY. 



INTRODUCTIOK 



" Who loves a garden loves a greenhouse too. 

 Unconscious of a less propitious clime. 

 There blooms exotic beauty, warm and snug. 

 While the winds wliistle and the snows descend. 



***** 



All plants, of every leaf, that can endure 



The wintei''s frown, if screened from his shrewd bite, 



Live there, and prosper." CowPEE. 



The briefness of the British summer and the frequent inter- 

 ruptions to out-door enjoyment, occasioned by adverse weather, 

 render the well-kept plant house a place of most agreeable 

 resort at every season of the year. The capabilities of our 

 climate are truly wonderful, for we may, with a considerable 

 degree of safety, enrich our gardens with plants that are 

 natives of subtropical and arctic climes ; and yet we find our 

 varying selection of subjects seriously restricted unless we are 

 aided by plant houses of some kind or other, to ensure for our 

 favourites better conditions than the unprotected soil and free 

 atmosphere would afford them. Hence, for pleasure and 

 utility alike, the various structures that have been adopted as 

 aids in plant-culture are of the utmost importance to the hor- 

 ticultural amateur, for they bring within the range of his ob- 

 servation and practice the vegetable products of climes that 

 difler greatly in conditions from our own, and they may be so 

 managed as to provide the best possible imitation of a per- 

 petual spring, or of " summer all the year round." 



The object of this little work is to afford some useful 



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