S'2 
GARDENING AS A SCIENCE. 
Ever?/ hud^ could we know how to treat it, is capable of pn.ducing a fac-simile 
of its parent : but as it is not our present object to teach the art of propagation or 
extension, but to elucidate the science of development, we refer to the ridiculed and 
despised, yet truly instructive, practice of experimenting with cuttings in imter. 
There are now three specimens before us, to which we will refer. 
The first is the Nerium Oleander splendens^ a plant which perhaps was propa- 
gated almost as soon as it w^as introduced, by placing cuttings in a bottle of water 
retained at the temperature of a sunny window in a warm room. In October 1841, 
a cutting of four joints was taken from the summit of a leading shoot, which con- 
tained the rudiments of the future corymbous flower-spike. It was cut about the 
one-sixteenth of an inch below a joint where there was visible a very minute bud, 
and immediately placed in rain-water, an inch or more deep contained in a 
phial. Retained in a cold vinery all the winter, it still remained green, but torpid, 
till February. About the same period another cutting with three conjoint shoots 
was taken off just below the junction of the three, was planted in mould and moss, 
and placed in a cold pit, where it was unprotected by anything but covers and 
linings of cold leaves and straw, till the first week of April. Being then examined, 
no radical action had taken place, and the extreme end was decayed. Thus, the 
freezing-point is not fatal to Nerium, either in water or earth. 
The phial and its cutting were removed to a stove at sixty to seventy degrees, 
and placed on a rather w^arm shelf above a flue ; 
and in two or three days one white fibre emerged 
on the side of, and just below, the little eye at 
the base, a very m.inute thread of granular white 
callus passing round the liber at I, As the root 
branched, the bud germinated, grew, and at length 
surmounted the old cutting' : both have three 
leaves, but the latter has lost its flower-spike. — a is 
the stem, h the sprouted shoot four inches long, 
and r the masses of branching^ white fibres, too 
numerous and intertwining to be figured ; they 
occupy a cylinder of water three and a half inches 
deep by two and a half inches wide. 
We will here impress the reader with the fact, that the ring of callus which 
precedes radification is a phenomenon restricted to the higher order of plants, 
exogens, chiefly : it is by no means coincident with the rooting of the lower order, 
as the simply herbaceous annual, and cryptogamous tribes. 
A 5^?co7^r/ example is found in Clianthus puniceus^ which, as we shall prove on 
the authority of Lindley, has the quality of developing roots from the leaf-stalk 
without any portion of the stem adhering. (Refer to Theory of Hort p. 203, and 
cut.) If a cutting of Clianthus, three or four inches long, of the wood of the past 
summer be taken in March or April, just below a joint, from the summit of a shoot 
