THE GA RDENERS' CHRONICLE. 



c% 



-aid draw far more heat from the bed (that is, ulti- 

 Jtely from the hot lining) than none at all would : 



It is. it would facilitate its escape into the cold soil 

 • : ound the pit; and small gardeners will leave three cool 

 **>iin r s, even when they put one fresh one. I must add 





r^fcw words about the position of a pit : — Muck must be 

 H*own together twice for most garden purposes, and 

 Stiist be wheeled into the garden. Muck once thrown 

 ^gether is f:t for the pit, so that the mere supplying 

 ^kt hot muck to the pit entails no expense, where it is 

 — > I required for the garden, and has not to be wheeled 

 tt again ; but where there is a farm-yard, I would 

 did the pit about 4 or 5 feet from the wall on the south 

 ie of it ; and for the brickwork by the wall have a pair 

 large doors folding inwards, opposite the middle of the 

 t or pits. The common farm-labourer would through 

 ie gateway throw the muck at once to heat against the 

 it, and when it cooled, would give it its regular turning 

 > heat again. On again cooling, the muck-carts would, 

 irough the opening, cart away the old muck, or part of 

 , for Grass, Turnips, Wheat, as the case might be, and 

 esh be thrown up as before. If thought necessary, 

 jro pits could be placed side by side, with an additional 

 •ench between them ; there would be no expense at all 

 ere, and only the slight inconvenience of carting a few 

 3ads for Turnips from a distance instead of from a heap 

 .n the field, at a time when horse labour is in demand, 

 en this would not be the case when mucking Grass or 

 or Wheat ; also, it is clear that any gentleman having a 

 touple of horses, or even one, might work a pit close to 

 Ms stable in the same way, although not quite so free 

 om trouble — that is, expense. — G. U. 

 Cabul Melons.— If Messrs. White and Co. had read 

 tentively my remarks at p. 684, on Mr. Cuthill's ad- 

 rtisement, they would have seen that it was the Cabul 

 elon which I denied having distributed seeds of. I 

 rtaioly had no intention of saying I had not supplied 

 [essrs. White and Co. with the seeds of the Hoosainee 

 11843. As many people seem to confound the above 

 two Melons, perhaps a short explanation here may be of 

 ise. The Hoosainee Melon, of which Messrs. White 

 ind Co. had seeds (or, as Mr. Cuthill would call it, the 

 rrentham Hoosainee), was raised here from the striped 

 loosainee impregnated with the Ispahan. It is a large 

 Uelon, a free bearer, exquisite in flavour, and I be- 

 leve inferior to scarcely any Melon in cultivation ; and 

 feel not a little proud of its having been raised here, 

 he tabul Melon is one of recent introduction. The 

 eeds were brought to England by the officers engaged in 

 ic Affghan war. It was first grown in this country, I 

 cheve, in 1843. With regard to its properties it 

 ids about the same size as the Hoosainee, is a very 

 erower, and bears abundantly. It is a handsome 

 ckly netted Melon, with a very sweet melting flesh— 

 . Fleming, Trentham Hall. 



Strawberry-plants-.!* the Calendar, p. 703, under 

 e head Pmer.es and Vineries, directions are given for 

 otecting from rain during the winter Strawberry-plants 

 pots or boxes, intended for forcing. " G. F." seems 

 tnmk tnat ram is detrimental to the plants in pots, 

 noer some circumstances I do not doubt its evil effects- 

 plants that have been properly prepared, and 

 wn as they ought to have been previous to the arrival 

 me rains of autumn, require no such injurious treat- 

 j" as boarding them in, which dries both leaves and 

 »• Ine best system that ever came under my obser- 

 uon, and which is adopted in many places where large 

 entities are forced, and that to the greatest perfection, 

 to Keep them, from the time of being finally potted, 

 ned down to the rims of the pots in beds of sand—a 



[o* IS! P l Ct , i8 P r6ferable ; and where the g ro ™ d will 

 SfrTw* 8 i 8 . h0uld have afaJ l of eighteen inches or 

 Jh ,1 L , must be regulated according to the 



Dl.n?. i ?!u S ' By this method :i have seen thousands 

 jants kept through the winter in fine health, and not 



m ff'fi P °i S ° r plants ****&*, either by rain or 

 ^Plan I" 6 ii r ? WDerries are wan *ed, the potting off 

 £ J ts ma h °K U ^ com P leted early in August, so that 



%teT 7 e 5l led with roots before wiDter ' a * ™ 



K Cess of forcing solely depends.-Memet. 

 H of Tv , herewith send you a sketch (full 

 *kedthi«L nS Seed,in S Strawberry, that was 

 »f fathrr'l mo T mg With 80me others iQ ar » open bed in 

 *A size vi iV 1 - m this town ' Its being of an un- 

 '"mht, nf „ . '* lnche s »n circumference, and U oz. in 

 ■ured K» handsome heart-shape, full coloured and 

 fonark ,, S f lnduced ™ to thus notice it. I also beg 

 Mm malZ mysdf and a yo un ger brother have had the 

 and w g t ment0f the garden for some !0 or 12 years 

 wberrip! h 8ucceeded »n obtaining finer crops of 

 princin n n an . nQ0St0four neighbours, which I attri- 



W IV ? not cuttin S off the leaves in the 

 I*"* renri *' A *° Tld 9*, near Wells, Somerset. [The 



r^TTnit a ve l y f fine specimen -i 



^northof Im y, "" A fnend who »s on a tour in 



™* years si, W i" te8 t0 me that since his last visit ' 



Uce » he has found considerable improve- 



i 



ill 





: 



S^nstruction r . 7 UaIians of their g ar,le ns, in 

 'r l yofthe»n • P Iant - hou ses, and especially in the 



I5 e Borr 0me r n C TT S H CUU ^ tei1 - The ^'gardens 

 Jitter Vp.? Is,ands ' ofMoriza, and of Padua, are 



W Bo »romean Ti J^J in Species " The g^dener 

 * of the HvH lsIand3 has succeeded in ripening the 

 W an ^ bv pL ? n p a horte nsis by artificial irapregna- 



W*- Th e Zh . CU / ting awfl y al1 the lar S e sterile 

 WW read* V i° L ,° f De C » n dolle's " Prodromus" 

 in January.—* printin g the 10th is to com- 



* 



p ~ ••» January * * ■ * "" * a tv/ UUUI " 



' ith abundanpf „? nurserymen's catalogues are now 



ttDCe Ot UOWers at A p-ninpa * n ,\ „»;«„„» -._ 



flowers at a guinea and guineas a- 



I piece, lue descriptions abound as usual with spiendid 

 matchless, indispensable, novel, magnificent, and words of 

 similar import without end. Amateurs believed it all 

 once, and with reason, for every season's advance was a 

 stride. But now we wait a bit to see them in their true 

 colours, and if we neither find them in letter A at Chia- 

 wick nor in the seedling tent among the two-years-old, 

 we shall put them down as good for nothing— unfit to ex- 

 hibit— in fact, all that our note-books remind us too many 

 of them are. Let nurserymen, therefore, do what the? 

 ought ; respond to the liberality of the Society offering 

 such liberal prizes, and serve the public and themselves" 

 by exhibiting the objects of their advertising praises at 

 the Shows of the ensuing season. There is abundance of 

 time, and nothing but want of merit can excuse their 

 absence. — A Purchaser. 



Morphology.— It is not a little amusing to notice the 

 very awkward predicament in which a person places him- 

 self, by speaking in disparagement of a theory merely 

 for the purpose of insulting those who have propounded 

 it ; but when we find that such an individual knows 

 nothing about the theory itself, and is determined to learn 

 nothing respecting it, then his remarks are too ridiculous 

 to be either amusing or insulting to any excepting those 

 who are as ignorant as himself. A striking exemplifica- 

 tion of this came under my observation at the last meet- 

 ing of the Regent's Park Gardeners' Society, in a discus- 

 sion on Morphology. After much had been said, and 

 several specimens exhibited in support of the claims of 

 that science to the regard of horticulturists, and nothing 

 intelligible proved against it, the last speaker, whose speech 

 applied about as much to Morphology as it did to the 

 planet Mercury, held up a well-formed Dahlia bloom, 

 and asked if Morphology could produce that ! It being 

 understood that no one else was to speak on the subject, 

 of course Morphologists had no opportunity of answering 

 the question, which to me was cause of regret, because 

 the same speaker on another occasion remarked that 

 '*The Dahlia was, in the recollection of many persons, 

 a single flower ; a row of five or six petals was all that 

 could be seen. A large yellow eye, which delighted 

 botanists, and the five, six, or seven single flat petals, 

 possessing no other novelty than colour, were all that 

 there was to admire." Now that the Dahlia has at 

 least ten times as many petals as formerly, quilled instead 

 of flat, and the " large yellow eye" has disappeared, a 

 proof is given that a change of organs has taken place in 

 it ; to what cause, then, may we attribute the produc- 

 tion of a double Dahlia ? The same authority remarked 

 that "The Dutch florists outran us in the production of 

 double Dahlias ; and while we were trying hard in this 

 country to improve the flower, or, as botanists call it, 

 spoil it, our Dutch brethren produced them fairly 

 double." No doubt they did. But did our Dutch 

 brethren set themselves to work in the first place to 

 create a principle in the plant, that would admit of being 

 wrought upon by artificial appliances, so as to change 

 the structural formation and habit of its progeny to a 

 wondrous, but as yet unknown extent? Or did they 

 find that such a principle was inherent to the plant, 

 ready to yield obedience to the skilful operations of man, 

 for the gratification of his wishes, as in a thousand other , 

 instances ? To assert the former is to make man a 

 creator, to admit the latter is to admit the truth of that 

 which harmonises with every known process through 

 which matter passes from the simple elements to the 

 highest compounds in organic nature, namely, the doc- 

 trine Of Morphology. Whose opinion, then, savours the 

 most of atheism — that of the Morphologist, who believes 

 that the various organs of plants are convertible from 

 one to another, and that they wera made by nature sus- 

 ceptible of receiving modifications from external in- 

 fluences ; or the anti-Morphologist, who ascribes every 

 transformation in the vegetable kingdom to either chance 

 or the art of man ? Common sense will answer the 

 question. I should not have made these remarks had 1 

 not been informed that four or five out of the 18 persons 

 who voted against Mr. T. Moore's excellent motion for 

 farther inquiry into the principles of Morphology were 

 respectable gardeners. I trust that those persons will, 

 for the sake of their own credit, and that of their Society, 

 look a little more closely into the subject before they 

 allow a blind scepticism again to associate them with 

 parties whose object has always been to degrade the cha- 

 racter of gardeners. — TV. Sherwood. [If we had any 

 influence with those persons in the Regent's Park Society 

 who have shown themselves on this occasion men of in- 

 telligence, as many of them have, and very much to their 

 credit, we should recommend them to separate from the 

 blockheads with whom they are now associated. It is a 

 pity that gardeners should waste their time in discus- 

 sions with gardenasses ; for thus we translate the terms 

 Eucepurus and Asinocepurus, which distinguish the two 

 great divisions admitted by Dr. James Bradley, in his 

 amusing and instructive Cepurologia ; a monograph 

 which we may possibly republish some of these days, 

 when we have collected a sufficient number of portraits to 

 illustrate the numerous species distinguished by Bradley 

 under each head. In the meanwhile, the following ex- 

 tract from one of the admirable articles in il Chambers's 

 New Edinburgh Journal," should be committed to 

 memory by all the parties concerned. " There is, on 

 the other hand, a scepticism which does not strictly 

 follow reason, but depends in a great measure upon ig- 

 norance, prejudice, sel£-conceit, and other unworthy 

 feelings. We are apt to pronounce an unfavourable opin- 

 ion of a new hypothesis without any examination, merely 

 because it does not agree with ideas already established 

 in our minds, when, if these ideas were rigidly tested, 

 they might be found either erroneous, or far short of the 



S3 



tull measure of the truth. It has been remarked bv Adam 

 omith, as the cause of the feeling of wonder, that we 

 lack something to connect our ordinary ideas with the 

 new one presented to us : not seeing the whole chain of 

 natural causes, we marvel. Now, marvelling is so agree- 

 able to some minds as to form an inducement to their 

 believing in novelties ; while with others, of a more rigo- 

 rous or cautious character, it presents only a ground of 

 suspicion. Thus to treat novel doctrines may be well so 

 far ; but if it be allowed to operate beyond the extent of 

 a salutary caution, if we invariably shut our ears against 

 new hypotheses, and persist in refusing them all oppor- 

 tunity of showing evidence in their own favour, merely 

 because some weaker, wonder-loving persons receive 

 them too readily, we obviously incur the risk of repressing 

 the advance of truth. And it cannot be doubted that if 

 those who receive all without discrimination are repre- 

 hensible, so also are those who reject all without dis- 

 crimination. When their doing so is partly, as often 

 happens, a result of mean personal feelings, it is certainly 

 worthy of the strongest reprobation. It is impossible to 

 imagine a sincere lover of truth acting in such a manner." 

 Seedling Cereus.—l herewith send a bloom of a seed- 

 ling Cereus, raised in all probability from longissimus 

 crossed by truncatus ; the habit is decidedly pendulous, 

 and it makes shoots of about a yard in length or more in 

 one season, presenting a very handsome appearance. It 

 is edged round the petals, and has a faint stripe down 

 the middle of each petal. I may add that this flower was 

 produced by severe ringing, by which mode I am in- 

 ducing a number of seedlings to flower. — Robert Erring- 

 ton. [The bloom sent was very double, and measured 

 fully 3 inches across. The colour was a delicate pink, 

 with a slight tinge of purple, and having a darker stripe 

 of pink up the centre of each petal. It is a very pretty 

 and desirable variety.] 



Foreign Correspondence. 



Wellington, Port Nicholson, New Zealand, May 13th t 

 1844. — After a very fine passage I am happy to inform 

 you that I and my family are all quite safe and well in 

 New Zealand. You know that we originally intended to 

 go to Nelson, to Captain Wakefield ; but owing to his 

 death, of which you will have heard by the time that this 

 reaches you, we stopped at Wellington, where we all got 

 good employment. I have been all day moving fruit- 

 trees in Mr. Stokes's garden, which, although they were 

 very badly arranged, and had only been planted eighteen 

 months, had thrown out such roots, shoots, and fruit- 

 buds, fully equal to those that had been planted five 

 years in England. The climate beats all I ever heard of, 

 and I have no doubt that it will in a short time be one of 

 the finest countries in the whole world. The Wheat, 

 even on the tops of the mountains, of which there are 

 plenty round Port Nicholson, yields from 45 to 50 bushels 

 per acre. The flour for the consumption of the settlers 

 has been mostly supplied from Sydney and Valparaiso ; 

 but from the continual motion of a windmill which has 

 lately been put up very close to some gardens which I 

 have been working in, I consider in a very short time we 

 shall be obliged to send some of our own New Zealand 

 flour to the above-mentioned places to get rid of it. I 

 was up at the valley of the Hutt, which is eight miles 

 from Wellington, last week, to prune some fruit trees for 

 Mr. Molesworth, one of the principal settlers here, and 

 1 slept at Burcham's, who has a very fine public house up 

 there, and is doing extremely well; both he and his wife 

 send their best respects to you. I am happy to inform 

 you that they are both good friends to me and mine. 

 My eldest daughter is stopping with them at the present 

 time. I have taken a few acres in the valley of the 

 Hutt, a short way above Burcham's, where I intend to 

 establish a fruit garden and nursery ; it is one of the 

 sweetest spots that ever was beheld by the eyes of man. 

 The beautiful River Hutt incloses one part of it, and the 

 other is belted by a range of mountains, which are 

 crowned with the most splendid trees from 50 to 150 

 feet high ; and out of respect to you, my dear sir, I have 

 called it u Loudon's Vale." I am afraid the Wellington 

 gentlemen won't much fancy me leaving them ; but I 

 shall be obliged now and then to come and prune their 

 trees for them. I have had capital success with Snow's 

 Cucumber and Green-fleshed Melon. They seem to 

 beat anything of the sort that was ever in this part of the 

 world. We have had two Horticultural Shows since I 

 have been here, at which I was one of the judges both 

 times, and it would surprise you to see what the place 

 produces, although as it were only four years old. I am 

 glad to say that your friend Mr. Stokes, who desires to 

 be kindly remembered to you, has carried away all the 

 head prizes. I am collecting seeds of all the best 

 New Zealand plants to send you, and by the next 

 ship that sails from this port you may expect a small 

 box of them. I have got on the table now before me 

 a parcel of berries of the New Zealand Yew, which 

 I am drying for you. You will please to write to 

 Mr. Brooks, and remember me kindly to him, and 

 tell him that I will send him a few things for his 

 Arboretum, and also in course of time some New Zealand 

 curiosities for his Museum. My family are all well 

 satisfied with the country, and never express the least 

 wish to return to England again. My eldest son is em- 

 ployed in a large store, and my youngest is in the 

 Medical Hall with Dr. Dorset, the gentleman off whom 

 I have taken the land, and who has been very kind to ail 

 my family, and indeed, I have met with nothing but kind- 

 ness since our arrival here. My two daughters have been 

 working at plaiting straws for bonnets, the first that has 

 been done in the colony ; it was exhibited at the Horti- 

 cultural Show, and is greatly in demand by every one as 





