90 
TREATMENT OF TECOMA GRANDIFLORA. 
The enormous evil in the management of the present and many other exotic 
climbers, is the seclusion of the earth in which they are planted from sun and air. 
Culturists imagine that if they can conceal a tub of earth, or part of a bed or border, 
so as to cause their climbers to expose nothing but their branches and foliage, they 
have attained a supremely desirable object ; and the health as well as inflorescence 
of the subjects of culture are sacrificed without scruple or thought. This is not 
the light in which we regard the case. Knowing the sheer impossibility of 
flowering some of the best climbing plants in our collections in any manner at all 
approaching to perfection, unless their soil be duly exposed to atmospheric action, 
we would choose rather to have that soil open, on a level with other things in the 
house, and to grow a less number of plants satisfactorily, than to have a more 
crowded arrangement, with perpetual sickliness as a concomitant. 
In the management, then, of this species as a greenhouse climber, it ought to be 
kept in a light house, and if trained from the bottom to the top of the structure, 
the pot or tub in which it is placed should stand as high as the front stage for pots, 
and not be shaded or smothered up with other plants. By this means, the roots 
will be relieved from the danger of becoming saturated, as a facile control can be 
exercised over the supply of water, and the plant will soon lose its false character 
of being a sparing flowerer, by showing that it is naturally more likely to debilitate 
itself with a too liberal production of bloom. 
But besides being a climbing species of no ordinary attraction, our plant may 
readily be converted into a greenhouse shrub. Planted in a pofc or tub of moderate 
size, and subjected to the routine generally followed in the greenhouse, it may be 
made, by judicious winter pruning, and a careful regulation of its fluid resources, 
to protrude several branches when only three or four feet high, and to bear a large 
panicle of blossoms from the points of each of these. To bring it to such a condition, 
dryness in autumn and winter, proper pruning, free access of light, and the removal 
to a slight distance of all plants that would prevent the solar rays from reaching 
the receptacle to which it is confined, are the essential pre-requisites. It will be 
readily believed by those who know the plant, that a shrub with four or five panicles, 
each composed of ten or twelve of its spacious pendulous flowers, of which three or 
more expand simultaneously on every cluster, and remain open several weeks, 
must present a most gorgeous appearance. 
Further, although so well adapted for the greenhouse, it is on no account to be 
excluded from the stove. In a house filled with stove species at Claremont, the 
seat of the King of the Belgians, the plants are kept so much drier in the latter 
portion of the summer than the generality of similar kinds, that not a few of them 
are more prolific of flowers than specimens of the same species in other collections. 
Among these, we have discovered plants of Teco7na gfandifiora^ barely eighteen 
inches in height, and obtained from cuttings in the earlier months of the season, 
blooming through September and October, with a panicle of flowers half as long as 
their stem. Their fertility had, no doubt, been occasioned by the efi*ect of the dry 
