TUE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GDIDE. 
145 
bottom, makes an easily-fixed and effective foundation for training 
objects against a wall. A good deal may be done towards hiding 
and improving objectionable corners by an ingenious application of 
the new material, virgin cork. The use of this article, however, has 
80 much extended that the subject would form a long paper of itself. 
By way of parting advice for suburban horticulturists, we would 
say that, cceteris paribus, always prefer a dwelling with some sort 
of garden, and that, if possible, with separating partitions of open 
work instead of blocks of bricks. 
PLANTS IN POTS. 
NOTES FOR AMATEURS ON THE CULTITATION OF PLANTS IN POTS. 
IN TWO PARTS.— PART II. 
ROPA GATING by seeds and cuttings will be part of 
the regular routine work, and the amateur who loves 
plant growing will be ambitious of distinction in this 
part of the business. It must be confessed, however, 
that to take a young plant from the hands of a nursery- 
man, and by careful management develop its full capabilities, so that 
in due time — it may be but a few months or it may be many 
years — that plant shall have become a noble specimen, is a task far 
more worthy of an amateur’s ambition. We can always buy plants 
to begin with, but we must acquire by patience and perseverance 
the skill requisite to the development of their beauties. One of the 
first requisites to success in the multiplication of plants is a propa- 
gating house or pit. It is customary to enclose, by means of a glass 
screen, a small portion of the warmest end of a stove or greenhouse 
for this purpose, and to ensure bottom-heat by means of a shallow 
tank covered with slates, the water in the tank being heated by 
conducting it through the flow-pipe at the point where the latter is 
connected with the boiler. But almost any amount of propagating 
may be done without any special arrangement of this sort, especially 
in a garden where a hotbed is made up in spring, and advantage is 
taken of the natural heat of the earth in the later portion of the 
summer season. Frames and pits are valuable auxiliaries to the 
greenhouse, and, indeed, there can be but little done without them 
where soft-wooded plants, notable for an abundant product'on of 
flowers, are held in favour. The grower of hard-wooded plants and 
succulents will have much less need of them. Hand lights, beU 
glasses, and the propagating boxes made of cheap tile-ware, may be 
rendered serviceable at all seasons of the year in the multiplication 
of plants, and the enthusiastic plant-grower will soon learn how to 
make them repay their cost a dozen times over every year. The 
necessity for such contrivances arises out of the fact that a moist, 
warm soil, and a still, moist, warm atmosphere, are peculiarly favour- 
able to the germination of seeds, and the rooting of cuttings, and if 
the amateur will always bear this fact in mind, the business of pro- 
Uar. 10 
