96 Hardy Plants for Cottage Gardens 



plants when I have failed repeatedly to germinate certain 

 seeds. 



Do not think because you have a perennial garden that 

 you can set out your plants once for all, and then retire on 

 the half-pay list. It often takes more strenuous labor to get 

 a plant out of the ground than it took to put it in. A peren- 

 nial garden worthy of its name grows like Jack's bean-stalk 

 and requires division, resetting and bestowal upon the poor 

 twice a year: not every plant of course; but enough to keep 

 up a continual exhuming and excavation. 



There are various ways of dividing roots, and unless you 

 know your plant well it is advisable to lift it bodily and hold 

 an autopsy. Some plants, like the Armerias, make a single 

 close tuft of leaves and the root cannot be divided safely. 

 They must be propagated by seeds or cuttings. Others send 

 out running shoots from the root, each in turn making a sep- 

 arate root growth of its own, such as the Michaelmas daisy, 

 garden heliotrope, sweet-william, Physostegia, Bocconia sub- 

 cor data j Achillea, Boltonia; these can be separated and reset. 

 Others form huge clumps and must be divided by a spade; 

 others form a clustered group of separate roots, which need 

 only to be untwined and set out; the Verbascum for example. 

 I have tried in the Appendix to cover this point of propaga- 

 tion by division of the root in its special application to dif- 

 ferent varieties. 



Some plants require layering for their propagation, which 

 is to bend a branch down to the ground, making a slight 

 incision in the stem near a bud with a sharp knife, usually 

 cutting in a slanting direction, pegging it down either with a 

 hairpin or & small pronged twig so as to keep it in place, 

 then covering this incision an inch or more deep with sandy 

 loam. Keep well watered, and in the course of a few weeks, 

 roots will form at this point, and in six months or a year the 



