February 7, 1884. ] 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
101 
product, which, without allowing anything for labour and casks, 
places the fruit value at Is. per bushel. 
Now, why was this fruit not sent to London ? Simply because 
the railway rates for its carriage, together with the exactions of 
dealers and middlemen, have in previous seasons proved to the 
growers that loss rather than gain would result from so dealing with 
it. Asa rule farmers are ready enough to go into the culture of 
vegetables and to multiply poultry with view to egg-production, and 
even to turn their attention to jam if any reasonable chance of profit 
exists. Such of them as have tried the two first-named panaceas 
have, to their cost, found that after sending the Cabbages and 
Cauliflowers to market, the lords of the railways generally gobbled 
up all the market proceeds. Jam, it is true, has yet to be tried. 
Wary ones, however, have well-grounded fears that the railway 
demand for carriage of the pots alone, preparatory to filling, would 
absorb a big slice of the yield from the product. 
Sad indeed is the condition of the British farmer. On every 
hand. Scylla or Charybdis seems before them. The cattle disease is 
stalking throughout the land, yet it is at such a moment Mr. Gladstone 
tells farmers to go and make jam. Surely this is a day for other and 
more friendly searching counsel. Might they not have been more 
wisely directed to railway reform? Under the existing pernicious 
system foreign farm products are conveyed at through rates from 
foreign far-off places to London and other large seats of consumption 
at greatly lower sums than the mileage rates he is charged, and thus 
the British farmer is driven out of the field. He does not object to 
foreign competition fairty conducted, neither would he lessen the 
abundance to his brethren in the towns. He does, however, feel the 
hardship and injustice of being shut out of his own markets by 
iniquitous preferences given to his foreign competitors. 
It is not only on fruit and eggs that the railways are extortionate. 
The farmer is practically shut out from receiving dung from the 
cities and other fertilisers from a distance. Lime and salt, so 
beneficial on certain soils, are often weighted as if they were gold 
dust; and as to feeding stuffs for cattle, these are conveyed only 
as though intended for the farmers’ table rather than as the material 
of meat product for mankind. It costs from 25s. to 30s. to move a 
ton of linseed cake from the great emporium of Liverpool into parts 
of Sussex, a service which in America would be done at less than 
one-third this cost. What chance has the British farmer to meet 
rent, crushing local rates, tithes, and Government taxes in the teeth 
of such handicapping ? The thing is hopeless. After long years of 
fruitless remonstrance and striving against the wiles of railway 
executives, it is evident that nothing short of permanently es'.ablish- 
ing the Railway Commissioners with full powers to control the 
complained-of exactions will meet this great national evil. The 
existing race of railway managers, however able they may be in 
conducting costty parliamentary fights at Westminster, are, for the 
most part, of a school of the past. Men who have striven to discourage 
third-class travelling, now seen to be the most profitable business, 
and who, in such instances as that of the Brighton line, have done 
their utmost to drive this class into vehicles of a worse description 
than their old style of cattle trucks, are hardly the men to see these 
questions in a true light. 
Fruit-growers are buoyed up with hope that the more extreme 
exactions of the railways will be cured when the Railway Commission 
is reconstituted and its powers extended so as to restrain the im¬ 
politic action of the Committee in obstructing everything that tends 
to agricultural helpfulness. The farmers in America are not so 
dealt with ; they have secured for themselves justice and fair dealing. 
What would be said for a rate of 15 d. for the carriage of a can of 
milk of thirty gallons 128 miles ? Such is the charge on more than 
one railway in America. 
It would seem impossible that the present rates for fruits, farming 
produce, and farming needs, such as manures, lime, and feeding 
stuffs, can be allowed to continue until the whole interest becomes 
involved in ruin. Throughout America the consumption of fruit is 
tenfold greater than with us, and mainly through the facilities and 
low rates of the railways. It is known that a practical fruit grower, 
the owner and planter of over sixty acres of the choicer kinds of 
Pears and Plums on his freehold farm at Slinfold in Sussex, and who 
has recently made several visits to America, has gathered such 
information as will greatly assist the Railway Commis.-ion on this 
important question. It is well that facts of the kind should be made 
public before an official tribunal which will deal with them impartially. 
Fruit-growers and farmers have borne and suffered long enough.— 
—A Fruit-Grower. 
GLAZED v. ORDINARY POTS. 
I AM very happy to see this subject discussed in a contemporary, 
though with the exception of the veteran—I might say champion 
plant-grower of his day, Mr. Thomas Baines—none of the writers can 
speak from personal experience of the matter ; and as this is a subject 
that I consider well worthy of being discussed, and having, so far as 
I know, been the first to make use of glazed pots on an extensive 
scale and over a period of about twelve years, I would like to offer 
a few remarks on the subject. 
It is now about forty years since I had the opportunity of admiring 
the beautiful examples of Pelargoniums that the late Mr. Beck of 
Isleworth used to compete successfully with at the shows in the 
Botanic Gardens in Regent’s Park and elsewhere. These fine plants 
were gi’own in neat little slate tubs as close in the grain and as air 
and moisture proof almost as iron. The plants were beautifully 
healthy, and, so far as I am aware, Mr. Beck was the first to use 
these vessels in a systematic way. Cottagers without any reasoning 
or conviction in the matter, and most probably of necessity, have for 
generations grown window plants in old cracked teapots, &c. I once 
judged at a show where the first-prize Fern was presented in a cracked 
cast-iron poiridge or potato pot! So there is no use in discussing 
who was the first to use glazed or iron vessels for plants, for perhaps 
it might have been Tubal Cain or some of his contemporaries, and so 
let them have what credit there is in it. 
I do not know of anything connected with plant-growing in pots 
in which a revolution is more called for than in the description of 
pot so generally in use. The common flower pot is, to begin with, 
ugly, especially the English-made one. It is easily broken, and con¬ 
sequently expensive. When water that is soft and of the best de¬ 
scription for plants is used it soon gets more ugly still, and dirty into 
the bargain. It takes very much labour to keep it clean by scrubbing 
and washing, and every time the process takes place the confervm or 
slime is more or less washed on to the surface of the soil, and, in the 
case of perforated Orchid pots, among the crocks or charcoal and roots ; 
and there it propagates itself and breeds corruption, to say nothing 
of the breakage of roots in the case of Orchids every time the scrub¬ 
bing takes place. The roots of a plant must of necessity be subject. 
to chills in it, because when the surface is moist—and it is nearly 
always so—evaporation is continually going on from its outer surface, 
and consequently also more water is required for a plant in such 
a pot. 
The common notion that it, the common pot, is better for plants 
because it is porous and admits air to the roots is simply a popular 
delusion, like the old saw that “a green yule makes a fat kirkyard,” 
and many others besides. I will not discuss the disadvantage or 
advantage of air getting at the roots beyond saying that if there 
were no aperture in a pot besides the usual one, the air would be forced 
up through it just to the extent that there might be a vacuum ; yet 
this is the chief objeclion offered to house upon houseful of plants 
grown in glazed pots here—a knowing shake of the head, and the 
remark that “Air cannot so well get at the roots.” A little of the 
elements of natural philosophy would dispel thit and every other 
objection that can be urged against glazed pots. 
I do not know whether they still exist, but some of the most 
flourishing Tree Ferns I ever saw were in the Kibble conservatory in 
the Botanic Gardens, Glasgow, grown in galvanised iron pots or 
round tubs. This was after I had adopted glazed pots, and it led me to 
procure the address of the maker of these tubs, and get estimates for 
various sizes of pots, but I did not feel warranted in going in for them, 
although not certain that over, say, twenty years the expense would 
not be in favour of galvanised iron as against common pots if there 
were no other objections to them. For one thing, the partridge- 
coloured glazed pot looks far more pleasing. Anyone who will invent 
a light imperishable—that is, unbreakable pot, at even double or 
treble the price of ordinary pots, would I am certain confer a benefit 
on horticulture. 
All the stove plants here have for years been grown in glazed 
pots up to as large sizes as can be made ; all the Palms, Ferns, and 
five sixths of four large housefuls of Orchids, and there are pots in 
stock into which the other sixth will be put before many weeks. I 
have come to look on a common pot for all such plants with a 
“scunner,” to use a Scotticism, and will not be satisfied till all our 
house plants are in them. As to the comparative merits or health of 
the plants in the two kinds of pots, all I will say is that if I found 
any plant doing better in the ordinary pot I would not adopt a glazed 
one. This is not saying that the plants are better or even as good 
as some grown in common pots, but if they are worse than those 
of many other cultivators I would not give the dirty old pot the 
credit of it. 
Now as to the expense. The glazed pots cost exactly a fourth 
more than the common pot, but I have now got them made so that 
they are much stronger and not so subject to breakage as the old pot, 
so firm and hard that they ring like a bell. In the end they will 
come cheaper, especially if the labour of washing and scrubbing is 
taken into account. 
I have this season had glazed suspending pans for such plants as 
Nepenthes, Dendrobiums, «4c. ; and they look so much better and 
