320 On Grafting, Budding, fyc. Garden Roses; 



it often happens, in bending down the stem of high plants, to 

 see their flowers, that their stem is injured and the buds dis- 

 placed by the curiosity of persons desirous of minutely ex- 

 amining them. 



At the pruning season, the branches of the budded plants 

 which are formed into a head, are annually cut down to nine 

 inches in length, and we do the same thing with our Roses 

 which are not budded ; we thus obtain a great deal of young 

 wood, and a bushy plant, as well as a very large number of 

 flowers. The pruning is performed at the end of January ; 

 all the four-year old wood is cut entirely back, and the plants 

 themselves are taken up and renewed at the end of eight 

 years. 



Whenever we wish to make our Roses flower in the 

 autumn, we prune them back in the spring, as soon as we can 

 discover their flower-buds. 



In order to obtain stocks, we take from the woods and 

 hedges suckers of the Dog-Rose, which is very abundant in 

 Flanders, and which like every other tree or shrub increasing 

 itself spontaneously, has its roots bent like that of a layer. 

 We select plants without lateral branches, and take them 

 up before winter, to be planted into their places after the 

 winter, and we cut down the stem to a foot and a half in 

 length. The stocks make suckers most usually the year 

 after budding, but afterwards in greater quantity ; we do not 

 destroy these suckers, but in the following spring we lay 

 them down to the depth of an inch or more, and leave only 

 the end of the sucker above-ground. Each eye forms a 

 cluster of roots, and furnishes a very fine stock which is taken 

 up after winter. When a bud has missed, which rarely 



