SHADING. 
107 
SHADING. 
The season is close at hand when the application of shades, 
to intercept and mollify the fierce rays of the summer’s sun, 
becomes one of the most important operations in horticulture; 
every gardener knows how necessary it is to shield his cuttings 
and tender-growing plants from the mid-day intensity of this 
light; the majority of cultivated vegetation grows perceptibly 
more when shaded in a judicious manner, and without some 
intervention of the kind it is impossible to preserve certain tribes 
at all. Orchids cannot be grown in the face of a hot sun, their 
leaves blister, scorch, and die. Flowers too of all kinds are 
robbed of their beauty, and rendered short-lived by its effects ; 
an enervation seems to seize upon all, even to the natives of 
exposed situations in the torrid zone, and they wait, drooping 
and breathless as it were, for the reduction of this power. 
It may be worth while to inquire why plants of all kinds, 
whether indigenous or exotic, should be thus affected, and to 
make the matter more perplexing, it is remarkable that exotics, 
derived from countries where the power of the sun is represented 
as greatly exceeding what we experience, should suffer considerably 
more than do the plants of our own land ; it is also to be observed 
that it is not the increase of temperature consequent on the 
presence of the sun which causes the prostration of their faculties, 
for many of those which suffer most may be grown for months 
together in a far greater heat with evident advantage ; indeed the 
tenderest cuttings seem to derive a benefit from the heat diffused 
around them when the direct ray is warded off. Those who 
excel in the culture of hard-wooded plants are fully alive to the 
advantage of some screen for their choicest specimens, and the 
practice of erecting awnings for them and for the florist’s 
more evanescent rarities is now common; was it that injury 
resulted from excess of heat, such contrivances would only prove 
an aggravation of the evil, for in the open air the average tem¬ 
perature beneath an awning will be found greater than in places 
open to the influence of cooling breezes. If then it is not the 
heat which causes mischief, what other power does the sun 
possess? Let us inquire of that profoundly astonishing and 
