ON ARRANGING PLANTS IN CONSERVATORIES. 
15 
in pots are subjected, such as superfluous or scanty allowances of water ; the burning 
action of the sun on their roots, through the medium of the sides of the pots : and 
either checks for want of pot-room, or disease from the repletion induced by being 
placed in too large a receptacle. However paradoxical it may seem to say that 
specimens which are much overpotted, are far more exposed to detriment than such 
as are planted in a spacious border of earth, it is notorious that the latter, by the 
superior energy they derive, and by the rareness with which water accumulates 
prejudicially in large masses of drained earth, easily dispose of all the fluid around 
them, and are scarcely ever found in what is called the "sour" soil so common 
in pots. 
"When it is remembered, too, how useful a moist atmosphere is to growing plants, 
it will be perceived, that the provision of extensive beds of earth is the best means 
of affording this, inasmuch as they permit the most constant and regular exhalations. 
As a final advantage attending the transplantation of specimens in conservatories, 
we may just allude to the saving of labour and actual expense it occasions. After 
the first preparation and filling of the beds, watering will occupy far less time, and 
be demanded much less frequently than if the plants were in pots, while the 
subsequent trouble of potting xind the cost of new pots will be entirely dispensed with. 
With such recommendations, it would be singular that the method is not more 
commonly practised, were it not that the number of gross errors mostly committed 
in its adoption so counteract and nullify its obvious advantages, that persons are 
loth to follow it on account of the slo venly appearance usually presented by existing 
conservatories thus planted. The wildness and disorder, however, which are 
ordinarily met with in planted conservatories, are by no means necessary conse- 
quences of the system. They rather arise from the mistakes which are made by 
those on whom the furnishing and after-management of such structures devolves. 
As defects can hardly be remedied until they are shown to be such, and their 
injurious tendencies are made thoroughly and convincingly apparent, we will now 
explain why conservatories are not the orderly and attractive houses which they 
might be. 
Cultivators are far from being sufficiently alive to the necessity for regulating 
properly the quantity, quality, and position of the soil placed in the beds of conser- 
vatories. Assuming that drainage is never neglected, and that a good sub-stratum 
of some hard or stony material is deposited beneath the earth, the depth of the 
latter is often a matter of indifference, and from two to three feet, and sometimes 
more, is thought to be essential. Now one grand object of the cultivator of exotics 
should be to keep the roots near the surface ; otherwise an undesirable and incon- 
venient exuberance of growth, and a deficiency of flowers, is certain to ensue. They 
who seek to know why some species obtain so great a height, and straggle so 
clumsily over the more valuable kinds, will find a partial answer in the depth of 
soil which is allowed to them. Eighteen inches, or two feet at the utmost, is, in 
our view, quite enough of earth for all but the stronger trees which come beneath 
