THE COLD GREENHOUSE, AND THE 

 FLOWERS GROWN IN IT 



" K.L.D.," a clever amateur gardener, sends the following 

 practical and interesting notes about the cold greenhouse : 

 There are many phases of garden work and countless 

 varieties of plant-houses, but amongst them all it is a matter 

 of regret that more use is not made of the unheated green- 

 house. As an early pioneer of cold-house gardening, let me 

 tell the story of my first experiences. It takes a long look 

 back through the vista of years to recall the old tumble-down 

 country rectory which had to be rebuilt, and the hope and 

 despair of having a greenhouse at all, which trembled in turns 

 in the fateful balance of pros and cons, and how, in the end, 

 a fairly good lean-to vinery was built of the window sashes 

 of the old house. There, in after years, many a good bunch 

 of black Hamburgh Grapes was cut, and many a fine plant 

 grown, though it is the fashion nowadays to say and with 

 a good deal of truth that grapes and flowers cannot be 

 grown together. There was nothing better, by way of 

 heating power in this vinery of about twenty-five feet in 

 length than a slow combustion stove far from an ideal 

 mode of gaining a genial plant-growing atmosphere. But 

 it was not the vinery that made me a cold-house gardener. 

 As luck would have it, a mistake in building the new house 

 made it needful, either to block up the side windows of both 

 drawing-room and dining-room, which opened upon the lawn, 

 or to build some kind of glass porch or vestibule to enclose 

 them and keep out an unbearable draught. The result was 

 a charming little conservatory, but one in which a boiler and 

 pipes, owing to its position, were quite out of the question. 

 Moreover, the village was situated on very high ground, nine 

 miles from a railway station, and coal cost as much or more 

 than it does now even in these days of high prices. The 

 problem was how to keep this conservatory bright with 

 flowers at all times of the year, and rather a stiff problem 

 it was to solve. I was but a novice in garden work in those 

 days, but I happened to have two qualifications which stood 



me in good stead, a strong love of flowers and a fairly good 



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