Jaaoary 17, 1895. 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
51 
thousands against some competitors with their hundreds. “ Oh I ” said 
he, “ you are stretching it rather talking o£ our thousands ; we might 
have 1600 plants.” Knowing this to be an absurd estimate, I laughed 
heartily. Some hours after I was standing near his stand (six) of one 
variety ; they were Merveille de Lyon. I acknowledge I am not a great 
admirer of this Rose (it is too fond of looking at the judges), and the 
white is very often too rakish looking—too used up—to suit my taste ; 
but these were grand blooms—perfect, and of course easily first. I was 
admiring them with some of the other prizewinners in the class, and 
we agreed that we had never seen a better stand of the Rose. Just at 
the moment the man came up, and I praised them warmly, saying I had 
never seen a better lot. To the amusement of my friends, who had 
also overheard the previous chafiE as to the big batallions, he replied, 
“ Well, we ought to be able to show that pretty well, we have 
500 plants of it.” “ Why,” I replied, ” that is pretty cool ; you said 
just now that you had only about 1600 plants altogether.” “ Ah ! well,” 
he remarked, ” we must have more, for we have 600 of that, and the 
same quantity of A, K. Williams, and several others I 1600 is soon made 
up." Mr. Grace would doubtless disapprove of one in the trade show¬ 
ing against himself as an amateur; yet why should one regulation 
stand and the other be set aside—by exhibitors, not by the Committee ? 
Trophy classes. Well, being only a “ little ’un,” they are classes I 
leave to my betters; bat I do think the suggestion of ” J. B.” as to the 
gold medal in addition to the trophy is sound, and should be carried out 
in one or other of the methods suggested by him. It is on the principle 
that holds in many societies, that the president on the conclusion of his 
year of oflSce should be added to the list of vice-presidents. The great 
honour has passed away from him, but the halo of the honour hangs 
about him still for the rest of his life, just as the gold medal would 
always be a reminder to everyone that the possessor of such medal had 
been a trophy champion. Certainly I would not omit the trade from 
similar mementoes. 
Our queen of flowers is a thorny beauty, but are her devotees more 
•cantankerous than others 1 I hope not, and I trust “ Gleaner ” will 
alter his judgment, esnecially as it is a “ regret” to him, and learn that 
the danger of titling with men under a rosey influence is not so very 
alarming—the thorns do not go deep. Bray induce him to ” glean ” 
again. I can assure him there is plenty of hearty good feeling in spite 
of thorns in the way.—Y. B, A. Z. 
REVIEW. 
The Book of the Rose, Bythe'R.^'v. A. Foster-Melliab, M.A. London: 
Macmillan & Co. 
Three hundred and thirty pages of matter in fourteen chapters, 
thirty illutrations save one, excellent paper, and clean easily read 
print—such in brief is the character of the ‘‘ Book of the Rose.” 
There are many works on Roses mostly good, and all different. For 
exhaustiveness Mr. William Paul’s bears the Palm, for humorous 
chattiness Dean Hole’s stands alone, while some are severely practical, 
more or less dry and didactic. Yet there was room for another 
just such as this, and we shall be very much surprised if the sale 
does not prove its wide acceptability. It is not a cheap compilation 
to be glanced through once and put aside, but a work of permanent 
value to bo treasured and studied for the information that it contains. 
It appears to bo a history of the actual work of an earnest and success¬ 
ful rosarian, one who is evidently not afraid of soiling his fingers or 
scratching his hands if he can develop the greatest attainable beauty in 
the flower he loves. 
The ” Beok of the Bose” is essentially useful, yet entertainingly 
written. The author seems to half regret that he has not put more 
“ fun in it.” It would have been a pity if he had done so, at the expense 
of those practical details by which he admits being ” overmastered ” 
It is the thoroughness that is stamped on every chapter, the evident 
desire to be useful in explaining the methods which have proved success¬ 
ful, and pointing out errors for avoidance, that invests the work with 
value. It is at the same time decidedly readable, and it would have 
been much less so if so-called “fun” had been sprinkled on every 
page. There is only one Dean Hole. It was at one time the fashion 
of writers to try and imitate him, but it was useless. The wishy-washy 
period of Rose literature thus incited has happily passed away, and 
we are glad that there is nothing in this latest work on the Rose to lead 
to its resuscitation. 
“ The Book of the Rose ” is mainly a book for exhibitors, or perhaps 
it would be more correct to say for those who are or may be animated 
with the desire to do all that can be accomplished by cultural skill in 
the production of ” glorious Roses,” worthy of being honoured with cups 
and medals by bxperienced and exacting adjudicators. On this point 
the author says:— 
“ I write for enthusiasts, for those who make a regular hobby of their 
Roses, and think of them as fondly and almost as fully in January as in 
June. There are not a few suoh, even among amateurs, in all ranks, and 
some of them, mnoh handicapped perhaps by so 1, dtuation, or circum¬ 
stances, si ill retain their ardour, though not meeting with much success. 
The man of basineea, who rises at daybreak to attend to his Roses before 
his day’s work in the town; who is quite prepared if necessary to go out 
with a good lantern on a November night to seize a favourable condition of 
soil for planting at once some newly arrived standards or dwarfs; and who 
later in the winter will torn out in the snow after dark to give some little 
extra protection that may be required for his beds; this is the sort of man 
for me, and lift the'Bose as well.” 
And our author would like the ” man ” to grow his own Roses—that 
is, do all that he can for them with his own hands, not paying someone 
else to do the thinking and working, and then the owner glorying in 
the blooms as if he (and not the other man) had produced them. When 
he actually does this, only having assistance for heavy work and in 
times of pressure, then does he reach the ideal; for, to cite again:— 
“ He will thus become a real amateur, a true son of Adam, and genuine 
brother of the back-ache, with many thorns in his fingers and rough and 
hardened hands; but his Roses will be truly his own, he will have won 
them, and under the Creator will actually have made them himself. And 
not only will they seem to him brighter and purer and sweeter than any 
other Roses, but he will probably find, in comparison and competition, that 
they are better than those of his brother amateurs who do not personally 
attend to their plants; and it will be a great thought for him that other far 
richer men may have grand and glorious gardens, but that he in his humble 
little plot with his own hands raises some of the finest Roses in England.” 
After useful references to “situations and soil” for Roses, also in¬ 
structions on planting, follows an excellent chapter on manures. In recom¬ 
mending that no manure be mixed in the upper layer of soil, but all to 
be placed from 8 to 24 inches down, and below all the roots when 
planted, the author does not think many Rose growers will agree with him, 
so he provides for them, and well too, in subsequent instructions. Some 
growers of Roses believe in the practice of trenching the ground and 
placing all the manure at the bottom of the trenches, as they find when 
the roots get down into it the plants grow strongly and produce fine 
blooms. Our author does not bury manure deeply for the roots to 
penetrate, as he is all for keeping them near the surface (page 53), there to 
remain for the rising moisture (by capillary attraction) bringing to them 
the virtues of the manure in solution for appropriation, as the bulbs are 
fed in Holland. Undoubtedly the bulbs benefit by the enriched moisture 
as it rises through the soil, but the roots do not “remain” near the surface 
for it, but go right down into the manure, even to the depth of 4 feet, 
and the roots of Roses have a habit of doing the same. This our author 
appears to know very well, because he objects to placing manure and 
soil in layers “ after the fashion of a sandwich,” because of the bottom 
layer of manure “ getting the roots too deep ” (page 53). That some of 
the virtues of deeply buried manure are brought upwards in the rising 
moisture is no doubt quite true, but that the roots of plants will wait 
near the surface for it is rather a new notion. Most of the virtues of 
deeply buried manure would be washed into the subsoil, if porous, and 
lost to the plants if the roots did not go down and imbibe it, thus pre¬ 
venting its escape. This is an interesting and also an important subject, 
and a searcher after truth such as our author is must be one of the first 
to desire that his views should be fairly examined. 
Very trite are his remarks on chemical manures as founded on the 
analysis of the ashes of the Rose, which is given, showing that potash 
lime and potash are the dominant constituents; but as the author 
correctly says:— 
“The first thing to remember is that there is one most important item 
not found in ash analysis, and that is nitrogen, for which in a chemical 
formula the uninitiated must look for the words ‘ nitrate ’ or ‘ ammonia.’ 
Nitrogen is the stimulant which gives life to the whole, like the spark of 
fire which gives such mighty power to the loaded cannon, or, to use more 
humble imagery, the penny in the slot which sets the whole elaborated 
machinery in motion. Mere nitrates, such as nitrate of soda, show 
immediate and wonderful results on unexhausted land, when all the plant 
wants is a start; but it is like drawing a cheque upon a bank, a capital way 
of supplying the needful as long as the hank is replenished accordingly, 
but otherwise not a mode of raising money likely to be successful for long; 
so the nitrate makes the mineral stores, such as potash and phosphates, 
available if they be there, but cannot replace them.” 
Not less interesting are his remarks and deductions relative to 
influences that the minerals mentioned exert on the wood, the roots, and 
the flowers of the Rose; while sound are the remarks on liquid manures. 
On this subject one point is brought out that is overlooked by not a few 
gardeners. We are told “it is wrong” to conclude that “because a 
plant is the strongest in the bed it therefore wants the least of the 
liquid manure; on the contrary, it wants, because it can use, the most.” 
Our author is evidently a thinking man as well as a close observer. 
This is apparent in the opening paragraphs in the able chapter on 
pruning. In pruning for exhibition blooms he tells us the whole of his 
dwarf plants in beds are every year “swept clean away nearly to the 
level of the ground.” Why? Because 
“ By watching an unpruned Rose tree, either wild or cultivated, it will 
be found that the first strong shoot flowers well the second season, but gets 
weaker at the extremity in a year or two, and another strong shoot starts 
considerably lower down or even from the very base of the plant, and this 
soon absorbs the majority of the sap, and will eventually starve the original 
shoot, and be itself thus starved in succession by another. A Rose in a 
natural state has thus every year some branches which are becoming 
weakened by the fre^h young shoots growing out below them. This is one 
of the principal reasons why pruning is nect-ssary. A Rose is not a tree to 
grow onwards and upwards, but a plant, which in the natural course every 
year or two forms fresh channels for the majority of the sap, and thus 
causes the branches and twigs above the new shoots to diminish in vitality. 
It seems better, therefore, to speak of Rose plants than of Rose trees, 
especially since standards are now less used, and so many new varieties are 
dwarf in their growth.” 
The question of stocks is fully, but not too fully, discussed, and 
illustrations given, which admirably display the character of the roots 
of the three kinds most generally employed—namely, those raised from 
Briar cuttings, Manetti cuttings, and seedling Briar stocks, the former 
