210 JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Wood Anemone with the brilliant colour if possible of its more pretentious 

 southern relatives. But let no one mistake. We by no means think that a 

 scarlet or a blue Wood Anemone would be more beautiful or as beautiful 

 as our present white one ; we should only like an occasional bunch of 

 scarlet and of blue planted amongst broad sheets of white. Any other 

 plants might be experimented with. For example, why does not some one 

 cross the Eed Currant with a Gooseberry so as to make the former sweet, 

 and reverse the cross so as to give a briskness to the ripe Gooseberry ? 

 Why not cross the white form of our wild Fritillaria Meleagris with 

 the yellow ' Crown Imperial,' or with Fritillaria Moggridgei or F. aurea, 

 or any of the beautiful golden species which are somewhat delicate, so as 

 to give us a really hardy and free yellow one ? What young man will set 

 to work on Grapes and see if he cannot puzzle out a combination of 

 parents or series of combinations which should eventually present all 

 northern people with an outdoor Grape with good-sized berry and with 

 Muscat flavour which would ripen in September not only in an exceptional 

 but in any ordinary English summer ? Or who will give us a hardy 

 yellow Ehododendron by crossing a white variety of the B. ponticum 

 group with a deep yellow variety of Azalea mollis ? Or who will take up 

 and carry on in a slightly different direction the inestimable work which 

 Mr. Fenn has done amongst Potatos ? He has given us large mealy and 

 disease-resisting tubers ; now let some one give us a series of delicious 

 small yellow-fleshed waxy ones lasting from the earliest ' Ashleaf Kidneys ' 

 well into the following spring, and equally disease-resisting. Some green- 

 house worker should cross Amaryllis (Hippeastrum) with both Clivia 

 and Pancratium and vice versa. By the way, in crossing hardy plants it 

 would as a rule be best to make the hardier of the two the seed parent, 

 but with greenhouse plants it is comparatively immaterial. A lady we 

 know of is endeavouring to cross a white Poppy with Meconopsis Wallichi. 

 She will probably fail ; but all honour to those who try, and if now and 

 then they should succeed, happy indeed will they be and will they make 

 others also. 



Grass or Cultivated Land under Fruit Trees. 

 We are frequently being asked by intending planters of orchards 

 whether it is better to have the land cultivated, or Grass, under the trees. 

 And, again, a correspondent writes that he finds the expense of constantly 

 cultivating the ground amongst his fruit trees so great compared with 

 what it would be under grass, he would therefore like to have our opinion 

 as to whether it would not be better to sow fine Grass seeds over the 

 whole, and thus save the expense of hoeing &c. The answer is a very 

 emphatic No ! All fruit growers who have tried the two methods have 

 found that hardy fruit trees on cultivated land are far more vigorous and 

 healthy and prolific ; they produce larger and better fruit, and are also 

 more free from insect attacks, than trees growing on Grass land. When 

 trees are on cultivated ground they get the benefit of all the rainfall ; and 

 the constant moving of the surface soil during the summer months lessens 

 the drying power of the sun on the land, as will be seen if the loose sur- 

 face soil is moved, a more or less moist soil being found just below owing 

 to evaporation having been arrested. Further, the constant stirring of 



