404 
REMARKS ON COILING VINES. 
facts of the case than your inferences from it,, respecting the practice 
which you say would be adopted by Mr. Mearns, are different from the 
statements which have been made by that horticulturist. 
Feeling pretty well satisfied with the propriety of your inferences, 
and leaving it to Mr. Mearns to correct your misconceptions where he 
is concerned, I trust you will take the trouble to read some of that 
practitioner’s first letters respecting the system,, and then say if your 
expectations of success could well be higher than the author gave 
reasons for anticipating. I am sorry I have not got the necessary docu¬ 
ments beside me, but from a memorandum of facts, I would direct your 
particular attention to the letters of Mr. Mearns contained in vol. if. 
p. 491, vol. iii. p. 104, of the Horticultural Register, and vol. x. p. 138 
of the Gardener’s Magazine; from which you will perceive, first, that 
success is spoken of in the most confident manner, and that too so 
ample in its extent as to enable the author, with the assistance of little 
more than twelve lights of framing, to insure the production of from 
five hundred to one thousand bunches of matured grapes ; and, secondly, 
you will be pleased to observe, that this extraordinary success is spoken 
of purely as the result of the first season’s culture. This I consider 
more necessary to be attended to, because I perceive that now both you 
and Mr. Mearns seem to advert to the second season as the period when 
the system will be attended with general utility; while I contend that 
success the second season formed, and could form, no distinguishing 
characteristic of the system; nay more, that the manner in which Mr. 
Mearns incidentally alludes to the treatment of those plants which 
might be kept a second season, advising the cutting away of their roots, 
clearly indicates that, at that time, he did not practise, or at least did 
not recommend his system for the rearing of plants which were to fruit 
in a following year. Disposed as I might have been to call in question 
the utility of the coiling system, even in the second season, as I might 
that of any other system of cultivating the vine in pots, unless in cir¬ 
cumstances where the vineries were insufficient to produce the requisite 
supply, and yet plenty of the means of labour at command, I certainly 
never should have publicly expressed my disapprobation of the coiling 
system, if I had not been fully convinced that the great success spoken 
of referred to the first season, and that alone. If Mr. Mearns had 
spoken of his system as one by which there was a possibility of obtain¬ 
ing a little fruit the first season, and by proper management (such as 
judicious stopping, &c.), a certainty of securing a crop the second season, 
there would then have been little disappointment experienced by gar¬ 
deners upon the subject. From not having read the Register quite 
regularly for this some time, I may be labouring under a mistake; but 
