ON THE PRUNING OF ROSES. 



437 



ON THE PRUNING OF ROSES. 

 By Monsieur Viviand-Morbl. 



•'The Pruning of Roses" is a matter eminently calculated to produce 

 ennui, and is a subject which has been discussed so often and over and 

 over again since Columella and Palladius that in approaching it one fears 

 to provoke the dictum " Non bis in idem." 



I have been told that it was an ass which showed the Athenians how 

 to prune the Vine, and since that remote time the Vine-growers of 

 Sparta, having been educated in the nursery gardens of Attica, set to 

 work to prune, not only Vines and fruit-trees, but shrubs of all sorts and 

 kinds. The massacre of the Innocents dates not only from the birth of 

 Christ, but long before the Christian era, I am sure, they pruned the 

 great mass of plants growing in their gardens atrociously. And if I am 

 asked why I thus impugn the gardeners of B<rotia, I reply that I arrive 

 at that conclusion in the following way : " The gardener," said Pascal, 

 " is a being who learns continually and lives for ever " : from which 1 

 argue, since many prune very badly to-day, imagine how those others 

 must have done it, three thousand years ago. But let me begin with an 

 outrageous query : Do you wish to weaken a tree or any shrub ? Then 

 prune it ! And if you doubt this axiom of vegetable physiology make 

 the following experiment : — Plant two exactly similar Rose-bushes, of the 

 same variety and of about the same weight, in the same soil. The next 

 year prune one of them and leave the other alone. Two years afterwards 

 prune the same one again and once more leave the other. Three years 

 afterwards weigh them both, and you will be much astonished to see that 

 the pruned Rose weighs much less than the unpruned one. A long time 

 ago I wrote the following, and I do not wish to recall a single line of it 

 at the present time : — 



I had a Noisette Rose, 1 Aimee Vibert,' budded on a 2 metres high 

 stock of Rosa canina, which in six years attained a diameter of 2h metres : 

 that is to say, it grew to be nearly 8 metres in circumference. M. Duchet 

 has a Rose of the same variety which covers the whole of the front of 

 his house. These two Rose-trees grew to such a size only because they 

 had been very little pruned. 



There is in the Botanical Garden at Lyons a clump of Hybrid Perpetual 

 Roses of the variety ' Victor Verdier,' which has been planted for twenty 

 years. On this clump Laf.mtaine exercised his skill as a pruner for 

 several years, and after him several other gardeners did the same, and 

 the clump now is slightly thinner than when it was first planted. This 

 is the result of twenty years of close pruning. 



Here, then, we have examples of ' Aimee Vibert,' little pruned, which 

 grew to an enormous size, whilst ' Victor Verdier,' regularly pruned every 

 year, remains poor and sickly. Does not that prove that pruning checks, 

 to a certain extent, the natural growth of Roses ? 



But until we have compared two Roses of the same variety we cannot 



