THE 
FLORIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
NEW GOOSEBERRIES. 
WITH AN ILLUSTBATION. 
HE Gooseberries of tbe Lancashire growers have long been famed for their 
great size, but an impression is abroad that they are inferior in quality as 
dessert fruit. This, however, is a false conclusion, so far as many of the 
varieties are concerned; and with a view to demonstrate this, we have 
selected, from a number of sorts obligingly forwarded to us last season by Mr. C. 
Leicester, of Crompton Road, Macclesfield, the two varieties here figured, which 
were certainly quite up to the average as regards the important quality of flavour, 
while from their size and beauty they rank amongst the choicer sorts grown for 
exhibition. 
Lobd Debby (fig. 1) is a seedling of Mr. Leicester’s, and is as yet new and little 
known. It is a fine showy fruit of the hairy-red class, bright and telling in 
colour, and brisk as well as rich in flavour; in every way a first-class fruit. 
ViOTOBY (fig. 2) is less novel, but is a first-rate variety amongst the whites. The 
former has been grown as heavy as 22 dwt. 11 gr. ; the latter has reached to 
17 dwt. 10 gr.—T. Moobe. 
CULTURE OF AZALEA INDICA.—I. 
HERE are few plants more generally grown or more worthy of cultivation 
than the Azalea indica^ and yet how seldom do we meet with it really well 
managed, how often with starved stunted growth and small colourless flowers, 
that render it a difficult matter to distinguish the variety by the appear¬ 
ance of the flowers I This is more attributable to the amount of bad treatment 
the plants will bear, than to any great diflSculty in their culture. It is true that 
they are particularly liable to the attacks of thrips and red-spider, and all who wish 
to grow and flower them in anything like a satisfactory manner must make up 
their minds to wage a war of extermination on these particular insects, otherwise 
success will never crown their labours. 
The Azalea being indigenous to the hill regions of India, we are at once 
pointed to the necessity of a humid atmosphere, as well as to plenty of light, 
during its season of growth. I have seen them grown in loam and sand, but 
they never are so fine, nor do the plants last so long, as when grown in good 
peat,—not the hard poor material w^ often see them in, but peat that is rich in 
the fibre of grass or fern-roots, with 6ne-sixth of clean sand added. The peat 
must not be sifted, but broken by hand, into pieces of the size of acorns for small 
plants, and as large as pigeons’ eggs for larger plants. Another practice with 
3bD SEBIES.—VII. B 
