CULTURE OF PELARGONIUMS. 
61 
Were the stately specimens which a summer s growth — induced by all need- 
ful nutriment, and the added assistance of every device which ingenuity or 
practice can add — has reared, left untouched, to resume their developments at 
the natural period, we should have, instead of small elegant plants, ungainly, 
monstrous, straggling shrubs, fit for nothing but a place in a garden plantation. 
Nor would this be the only evil of such a course. The moment that these 
artificial plants — for such, strictly speaking, they really are — were permitted to 
stretch beyond the bounds prescribed by the art which gave them birth, they 
would fall back into the character of their progenitors, and lose all those dazzling 
traits which have hitherto held us in admiration. 
In this remarkable propensity, we see plainly indicated that while man may 
improve, indefinitely, any natural object, he cannot set a permanent impress on 
either the most insignificant or the most splendid things. Thus, if we relax in our 
attentions to hybrid plants, and deny them the fostering influences under which 
they were raised, the production which had taken years to perfect may return 
to worthlessness in a few months. 
Beyond, however, the dictates of necessity, there are motives of expediency 
which impel us to reduce our Pelargonia annually. Were it not for this, they 
would become too large and troublesome, and in two years no pots would be found 
capable of containing them, or a house of moderate size that would hold more than 
a few dozens. Their beauty, independently of the flowers, consists likewise in a 
dwarf symmetry of form, which is violated on their reaching a greater height than 
a single year's growth exhibits. 
All these considerations, jointly operating, have given rise to the practice 
which we are about briefly to delineate. On an early occasion, posterior to the 
decay of the final flowers, each shoot should be cut down as low as one or two 
inches from the central stem. The autumnal, or late summer season, is chosen for 
this pruning ; because the plants thus headed down have time to emit new shoots, 
and compose the germs of future blossoms, before the inclemencies of winter. But 
it would be of little avail to reduce the superior portions of such plants, if the 
roots were not proportionally curtailed. And hence it is incumbent, on those who 
prune, to attend to this particular also. 
Lest immaturity of wood should frustrate the wishes of the cultivator, and 
leave his charge in a tender condition at the very outset of the winter which he 
had been preparing them to sustain, a trifling extra heat is created in the frame to 
which they are consigned, when severally planted in the smallest pots that will 
admit them. It is easy to raise this desired heightening of temperature by 
erecting a thin coating (by gardeners erroneously termed a lining) of fermenting 
manure around the frame. Nothing could be more suitable than the latter material, 
as, with the requisite heat, it will engender a fine genial moisture of the precise 
kind wanted. 
^ While luxuriating in an atmosphere so peculiarly adapted for eliciting new 
