NEW METHOD OF POTTING PLANTS. 
13 
contrary, the most important truths have generally, at the period of their elicitation, 
been opposed to current convictions, and common belief. 
In the first ages of floriculture, and those which, we may observe, have 
extended down very nearly to modern times, little attention was bestowed on the 
operation of potting plants. Once a year, they were all shifted, and perhaps 
repotted again, during the summer. This was done, however, because it was 
absolutely necessary, and not with the view of thereby bringing the plant to its 
greatest perfection ; for very commonly, in such cases, the specimen was removed 
to a much larger pot than that in which it was growing, and when it did not 
happen to be in a peculiarly vigorous state, so large a shift invariably injured it, 
by causing an accumulation of water in the superfluous soil. 
More recent practitioners, perceiving that the potting of plants affected their 
health and beauty to an immense extent, have entirely departed from the old 
method. By a careful and well-informed culturist, no specimen is potted till it 
really needs shifting ; and then it is transferred to a pot only one size larger, to be 
further removed, in a similar way, whenever its roots reach the outside of the soil. 
Thus, the potting of choice plants has come to be regarded as a thing to be con- 
tinually going forward : frequent and small shifts have been looked to as the 
standard of good culture ; and certainly the results of such a course have been in 
every respect gratifying. 
Admitting, as we do, that the mode just spoken of is mightily in advance of 
the old plan, that it produces the happiest consequences, and that the one of which 
we have to write is the direct reverse of it in its main principle, we cannot but 
state in what respects the now popular method is useful, and in what deficient. 
Plants in pots, it must ever be recollected, are in entirely different conditions 
from those which are growing in the open border. With their roots closely 
surrounded by an artificial wall or boundary, the very existence of which, and the 
manner in which it is drained, must have a great influence on all their functions, 
it is indispensable that they be treated somewhat artificially. To place a small 
plant in a large pot, by the ordinary means, and with the ordinary drainage, would 
be, as every one knows, either to ensure its death, or to render such an occurrence 
something more than probable. And if it stagger the inexperienced inquirer to 
learn that the same specimen would flourish most luxuriantly if at once planted in 
a border which had, comparatively to the largest pot, no limits whatever ; he may 
check his astonishment when he is told that it is the confinement of the pot, and 
not the amount of unoccupied soil it contains, that occasions the alleged detriment. 
Soil in a pot has, from watering, from the impossibility of air passing freely through 
it, and from the almost unavoidable imperfection of its drainage, a powerful 
tendency to become too much consolidated, and therefore too retentive of moisture. 
To counteract this tendency, the slight shiftings, often effected, which we have 
above alluded to as now being so general, have been resorted to. Most cultivators 
are aware that if the roots of plants penetrate the soil while it is in a porous and 
