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- 
cordata, 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 a 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 
