1843.] 
THE GARDENERY’ 
CHRONICLE. 
571 
Now ready, price 4s. 6d., 
RvezAL CHE Met Sata Rin xe 
;, By Epwarp Souty, Esq., Jun. F.R.S., 
Experimental Chemist to the Horticultural Society of London, 
Hon. Mem. of the Royal Agricultural Society, and Lecturer 
on Chemistry at the Royal Institution. 
London: 3, Charles-street, Covent Garden. 
The Gardeners’ Chronicle. 
SATURDAY, AUGUST'.19, 1843. 
MEETINGS FOR THE TWO FOLLOWING WEEKS. 
Friday, September1 . . . Botanical . 
Country Snow.—August 26 + Yorkshire Philosophical- 
Wnuen the late Sir Alexander Burnes returned 
from his adventurous visit to Bokhara, he mentioned, 
as one of the more remarkable products of that 
country, its magnificent Melons,—large, juicy, and 
Tich, beyond anything he had seen in the East. This 
fruit appears to have not less attracted attention among 
those who visited Cabul; and seeds have been sent 
home in abundance by officers employed in the 
Affghan expedition. ‘These seeds are now pearing 
fruit, and delicious they prove: not hard-fleshed, with 
a thick rind, like Oak bark, forming their larger part, 
and almost as indigestible as that substance,—but noble 
fruits, thin-skinned, delicate, and almost wholly eat- 
ab! uch a one was produced at a late meeting of 
the Horticultural Society by Mr. Fleming, the Duke 
of Sutherland’s gardener at Trentham; and we 
ave since seen a specimen of the famous Sirdar kind, 
grown in the Isle of Wight, which weighed nearly 
hine pounds, and would not have been inaptly named 
as some actually are, in the poetical language of the 
East) a mountain of sugar.” 
Few things more plainly show the great progress 
that has been silently made in gardening, than the 
skill with which this delicate fruit has been thus 
Teadily brought to perfection in a most unfavourable 
summer: When Sir Joseph Banks first introduced 
these-Persian Melons into notice, scarcely any one 
could find that they were better than Gourds; and 
Or a long time the late lamented President of the 
Horticultural Society stood almost alone in his success 
MN obtaining them of their native excellence. Now, 
lowever,—thanks to the admirable precepts of Mr. 
Knight, and to the general diffusion among gardeners 
ofa knowledge of the principles, as well as practice, of 
8ardening,—nobody seems to find any difficulty in the 
Matter ; and nothing would more surely mark a gar- 
dener as a bad one, than his clinging to his favourite 
old Rock Melons, in preference to the delicate varieties 
of Cabul and Candahar, hecausehe cannol grow the latter. 
‘In our opinion, a Melon is an infinitely better fruit than 
a Pine-apple, provided it is like the Ispahan, the 
Hoosainee, or, above all, the Sirdar ; it has the great 
Merit of being much more easily grown, and we 
Strongly recommend everybody who values his dessert, 
Not only in future to procure seeds of the Melons of 
the ast, or of those which have been raised from 
them, such as the Beechwood, but in future to expel 
the whole race of Cantaloupes and Rocks as entirely 
Unworthy of a modern garden. 
_ Tur reason why the soil of old gardens is so fertile 
1s, that there has been an accumulation of animal and 
Vegetable matter, beyond what was necessary to raise 
the plants cultivated. The only inconvenience arising 
from this is, that the soil has too little cohesion for 
‘ose plants which, like Wheat, require a firm bottom ; 
and hence the produce of these is not in proportion to 
the richness of the garden mould: besides this, so 
Many insects are bred in this superfluity of organic 
Matter which is undergoing sp de position, 
at many good gardeners, where there is a consider- 
The were, the too great richness of the black mould. 
th 
fr 
nding plenty of food at hand, do not spread 
°wnwards, but horizontally. Suppose that there be 
mar? SPting, so as to dry up the soil as far as the 
Beers lies,—this becomes inactive, and, instead of 
Surishing the roots, dries them up. The whole plant 
suffers, and its growth is stopped ; and when the ear 
comes at last out of its sheath and begins to swell, the 
straw is too weak to bear it, the root has no hold of 
the ground, and the least wind lays the whole plant 
prostrate. Ifthe same manure had been well mixed 
with the soil, and this stirred to a good depth, the 
fibres of the young roots would have struck down- 
wards and taken a good hold of the ground. No frost 
could then raise the whole plant out of the ground, 
nor any length of dry weather parch all the roots. 
When the seed is forming, and the greatest quantity 
of nourishment is required, it will be gathered by a 
much greater extent of root, and nothing will check 
the formation and swelling of the seed, as is often the 
case in very dry weather, and where the roots have no 
depth of sail 
There is another circumstance which materially 
affects the weight. of the crop: this is the distance 
between the plants. What would some farmers say, 
if we proposed to hoe out the Wheat plants to ten 
inches or more apart, as we do Turnips? and yet 
whoever has examined a crop of Wheat of seven or 
eight quarters per acre, will have seen that it consisted 
of tufts of ten or fifteen stems, each proceeding from 
one coronal root, and that such plants required nearly 
@ square foot of ground to grow in. they are 
crowded, the side stems are weak, and bear but small 
ears; but if they have sufficient room, all the stems 
are of equal height, and all the ears’ equally large: this, 
besides a heavy crop, produces an equal sample, which 
is more valuable in the market. The practice of dib- 
bling the Wheat, which is found so useful in Norfolk 
and Suffolk, leaves proper intervals between the plants, 
which can be hoed; and depositing the seed at a 
proper depth insures the formation of roots beyond 
the influence of a hot and dry sun. The great fault 
of the dibblers is, that they put too many seeds in each 
dibble-hole : if the seed is good, three or four grains, 
at most, are sufficient ; of these, one or two only will 
take the lead and form the tuft, the others will be 
overpowered by the more vigorous. When land is 
well prepared, half a bushel of seed is an ample allow- 
ance for an acre, the rows being at nine inches from 
each other, and the dibble-holes at the same distance 
in the rows. This allows of perfect stirring and 
hoeing of the intervals, and the complete destruc- 
tion of weeds. Whenever a simple and effective 
machine shall have been invented to make holes 
and deposit the seed with certainty and expedition ; 
or a perfect drop drill, which will answer the same 
purpose, and the land shall have been carefully pre- 
pared to receive the seed, we may expect to see 
the average produce of Corn in Great Britain and 
Ireland so increased, as to supply a continually in- 
creasing population ; while the mechanic will have 
his bread at a cheap rate, the farmers and the land- 
lords will be prosperous from the more abundant 
return of their land. Let all wet lands be well drained, 
all loose soils clayed or marled, if possible; the first 
rendered light by repeated stirring and long fresh 
dung, the latter consolidated by pressure and enriched 
with well-decomposed animal and vegetable manure. 
Let the crops be varied as much as possible, alternating 
the culmiferous and leguminous plants, and always 
having abundant green crops and roots to feed cattle 
and sheep in winter, increasing and economising every 
kind of manure, and blending it intimately with the soil 
by deep stirring. Whatever may have been the 
original soil, it will, in time, become fertile ; the only 
difference being, that the rich alluvial soils require 
much less tillage and manuring to keep up their 
fertility ; but if they are overcropped and neglected, 
they will soon be deteriorated and produce less than 
much inferior soils, which are properly managed. 
With great care and industry good crops may be 
raised on very indifferent soils, but the additional 
labour and expense should be fully compensated by 
the difference of the price or rent. Few men are 
aware of the value of rich land, which is cultivated 
at little expense, compared to that of the poorer, 
until they reckon the expense at which the crops are 
raised in either ; the difference is far greater than is 
usually made in valuations of rents. It may some- 
times be advantageous to buy poor land, but it is 
seldom so to rent it; and our advice to all young 
farmers is, to seek for farms in the richest districts, 
and to exercise their skill and industry in keeping up 
fertility, rather than in producing it where it did not 
exist before, although the last is by far the more 
patriotic plan. Let this be done by rich proprietors, 
or by those who have accumulated a capital by the 
cultivation of the soil and have ample experience.—M. 
AAAI 93 SITE 
Vourear errors are, of all things, the most difficult to 
deal with, not because of any want of argument or 
evidence to refute them, but because the persons who 
i ble of i 
writes thus :—* You will, perhaps, be astonished when 
I tell you that the majority of agriculturists in the 
eastern division of Kent assert, and most confidently 
too, that the plant they call Droke, (to botanists known 
as Loliumarvense,) is produced—they do not,—perhaps, 
entre nous, they cannot, tell how and why—from 
Wheat ; that is, to use their own expression, Wheat 
runs out into Droke. I conclude this would be better 
expressed by the word “degenerates” into Droke. I 
was told by a gentleman and his bailiff last week—and 
they are no mean judges in agricultural affairs—that 
twenty years’ experience had convinced them of the 
truth of this matter, and that Droke and Wheat had 
been found both growing on the same root. I could 
not persuade them that they had sown the Droke with 
the Wheat, which seems to me self-evident, as this 
plant rarely appears in any other than a Wheat field. 
I could not refrain from remarking to the bailiff, that 
some morning I should hear of his honey Bees being 
changed into Wasps. Facts are stubborn things, but 
I often think vulgar prejudice (I do not use the term 
offensively) equally stubborn. My scanty knowledge 
of botany and fondness for natural history in general 
tells me that the All-wise Creator allows of no devia- 
tion in his harmonious laws of nature, and that how- 
ever frequently we may find what is termed /usus 
nature, (or a sport of nature,) we do not find, either in 
the animal or vegetable worlds, that one body or plant, 
from any cause or effect, can be transformed into 
another. I therefore assert, Wheat can never turn 
into Droke, or Droke into Wheat. In the latter 
opinion my opponents agree.” 
This strange fancy is as “old as the hills.’ The 
ancients, says Linnzeus, fancied that Corn degenerated 
by degrees in bad land ; that Wheat changed into Rye, 
Rye into Barley, Barley into Rye-grass, Kye-grass into 
Brome grass, Brome-grass into Oats, and so on; an 
they even believed that Brome-grass and Barley might, 
on the other hand, improve into Rye. It was not so 
very unnatural that these fancies should be entertained, 
when people believed that Bees sprung spontaneously 
out of a dead bullock, or that the varied forms of 
creation are all the result of chance and accident; but 
it is astounding that any others than atheists should 
hold such doctrines now-a-days. They might as well 
believe that a man degenerates into a monkey, a mon- 
key into a squirrel, a squirrel into a rabbit, a rabbit 
into a rat, a rat into a bat, a bat into a sparrow, and so 
on. Such absurdities hardly deserve refutation. 
We would here ask these persons to watch the growth 
of an Acorn; to see how its shell is burst—how the 
young root grows downwards—how the seed-leaves 
(cotyledons) hold together—how the little branch 
comes up, and clothes itself with leaves, not of an 
Almond or a Fir-tree, but of the Oak; and to try 
whether, by starving or feeding it, he can persuade it 
to become anything else. And then, when he is satis- 
fied about that, to consider whether, if he cannot 
change the nature of the Oak, he can alter that of 
Wheat or Droke. Should he still remain in doubt, 
we would refer him to Linneus’s ingenious essay on 
the Transmutation of Corn (Z'ransmutatio frumen= 
torum), written to put an end (as it did) to this sort of 
folly in Sweden. If he is still proof to all such argu- 
ments, we can only conclude him to be one of those 
« qui fungum habent pro cerebro.” 
SCUTELLARIA. SPLENDENS; ITS INTEREST 
AND NEGL 
Tus showy species appears to be receiving far less 
attention at the hands of cultivators than its real merits 
deserve. Though less gorgeous than the Salvia, and much 
less capricious in its flowering than the Leonotis (Lion’s- 
tail), it is, nevertheless, equally beautiful, and much more 
subservient to the limite N 4 ete, eee 
With the exception of the instance of its cultivation in 
the establishment from whence its published figure is de- 
rived, I have not met with any other where its intrinsic 
value appears to have been equally appreciated. This 
apparent neglect may probably be traced to its habit of 
growth, wherein it so much resembles many of our com- 
mon half-hardy herbaceous plants, and offers one more 
instance wherein exists a striking disparity between the 
general habits and the splendid floral developments of 
mature growth in many of our fine autumnal plants. 
From this has arisen a partial, and in some instances a 
total, neglect of the means requisite for renovating their 
constitutional vigour ; thus leaving their latent beauties to 
‘blush unseen,” except to the few who have discovered 
their appropriate treatment. The natural result of this 
hasbeen, in many instances, an exposure of the plants 
to a temperature unequal to their required growth; in 
some cases consigned to the ungenial position of a north 
aspect, and in others wholly exposed to the open ground, 
where, in both instances, their stunted and collapsed 
appearance bore ample testimony to the chilling influences 
around them, ¢ 
Scutellaria splendens is a half-shrubby plant, requiring, 
during its season of growth, a warm greenhouse, or one 
tertain the errors are 1 ing 
argument or weighing evidence. Accordingly, we find 
people still maintaining that the Berberry blights their 
Corn, and that one kind of plant changes into sna 
i dent, who 
with the stove. Its period of flowering is 
from June to November, but well adapted, by being 
excited at different times, to bloom earlier or later, at the 
discretion of the grower, when subjected to a suitable 
t To attain a maturity of growth it should 
We are reminded of this by a cor 
