42 
y(. ^anneH ^ s4utumn ^atafo^ue. 
TREE5 AND 5HRUB5 
How to Transplant Successfully. 
Their Removal and Recovery no longer a matter of Chance and Loss, but one of 
Science and Success. 
Evbn in a moderately well-designed garden how lovely evergreens always look compared with a 
barren, uncultivated rough spot, particularly during the long dreary winter, even to those who 
unfortunately have not a keen taste for gardening, and if well grown all will stand and admire them in 
the spring before leafage becomes general on the deciduous kinds. 
On deciding to have ornamental and beautiful shrubberies, or a fruit garden, all will profit 
immensely by perusing, thinking over, and well understanding the following brief extemporaneous address 
given by Mr. H. Cannell, Senr., before the members of the Gardeners’ Association, Bromley, Kent. 
Choosing and ordering from the nurseryman is easy enough, but what 
I want to show, and what all interested in gardening should wish to 
know, is how to make a successful transfer of trees from one place to 
another without there being in the spring much difference in their 
growth, and without disfigurement and vexation. However careful we 
may be in taking up a plant it must lose more or less of its feeding roots. 
Nurserymen get many angry letters when the trees look bad or die 
during long continuous dry weather ; none*when they flourish. Lovely 
as they may be when they come in from the nursery, remember they 
have to probably undergo what in the hands of the unskilful workman 
is next to a killing operation, losing their main feeders. In my opinion 
there is no branch or operation in gardening which ought to be done 
with greater consideration and feeling, exactness and care than trans- 
planting, yet no work is commenced or carried on year after year so 
unthoughtfully, or with less consideration, although vigour of life, or 
death of our dear property is wholly dependent on the weather 
and our knowledge of their treatment. Here the true meaning of the 
phrase comes in : “ Nothing succeeds like success.” Watering and rainy 
weather is the chief secret, and the following is how to attain that happy 
object. The suffering in being taken up of the plant we value so much 
has never entered the operator’s mind. No one ever stops to look or 
think of the losses in the flow of sap which the plant must sustain by 
being wrenched up and the breaking of roots in taking them up from 
the hard ground, or to say what is wanted and what should be avoided. 
Most people are satisfied and contented so long as they get big long tops 
and a small portion of root, and conclude it is sure to grow, never thinking 
of the unequal balance between tops and roots before and after being 
taken up. This alone often prevents a plant succeeding, and when it 
becomes leafless, or its lovely green foliage turns to a dirty sickly brown, 
then the proprietor feels dissatisfied, and, of course, blames someone. No 
one cares to know how or why it occurs, why it lives, or why it died. 
Strange no one ever asks himself a common-sense question : 
What caused this plant to die ? There is a reason. Let us look 
at Nature in an ordinary sense manner. Plants, like mankind, cannot 
endure too much hardship or die just when they like, and when 
they do there is certainly something that has brought it about, and that 
THUJA ORIENTALIS. 
Reduced and made a better 
shape. 
