OoTOBER 24.] 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
47 
quired to sit in judgment between the trade and the 
public; and if they do at times see cause for saying this, 
that, or the other thing about a new plant, the safest 
way is to lean in favour of the stranger until the public 
give it a fair trial, and then one may chime in with 
either side, according to one’s own judgment. Half the 
gardening writers endeavoured last year to write down 
the Chinese Leadwort (Plumbago Larpentce), and they 
succeeded so far, that the mass who like to be led by 
the sleeve rather than take the trouble to think for 
themselves, turned away from it as from an unclean 
thing. I was nearly as far wrong on the other side, 
but that was more with a view to stem the torrent of 
prophecy which prejudged a stranger without a hearing— 
a very un-English way of dealing out justice. I did 
not care one straw whether the plant would do in the 
flower-garden or not; but knowing it to be in the hands 
of the trade, and selling lower than trumpery verbenas 
and petunias not worth a penny per dozen, before it 
was spoken against in our periodicals, I wrote in its 
favour, that we might all give it a trial; and if all had 
failed with it, no great harm could be done. But it has 
not failed. I have a bed of it in full bloom now, when 
almost all the summer plants are gone; and if I live 
another year, I shall plant four beds, on purpose for 
this time of the season, when families in the country 
enjoy their late flowers as they are getting scarce. It 
began to bloom in the first week in September, and by 
the 20th was in full bloom ; and what brought it to my 
mind to say anything about it now is, that a great gar¬ 
dener, the superintendent of one of our ducal establish¬ 
ments, who called on me the other day, admired it much 
and regretted that he was led away against it last season 
from what he read about it. He, too, will have a couple 
of beds of it next season, and so will many more besides, 
for this season has taught us a little more of its cha¬ 
racter and constitution It is .perfectly hardy; will do 
better in poor than in rich soil; requires to be planted 
thin, or thinned afterwards; and as it is a late autumnal 
bloomer out of doors, it must have a free exposure in a 
sunny aspect. Then, as long as the frost holds off, it 
comes in as a second or third rate bed, according to the 
stock of bedders in use ; and after the frost few will 
compete the leadership with it; besides, the bed is not 
an eye-sore through the rest of the autumn, for it will 
stand brim-full, find look well after the flowers are gone. 
It is, on the other hand, not suited for small places, 
where every bed should be in bloom with something or 
other from the time the spring bulbs come in till the 
frost clears off the autumn crop. 
Half-hardy Plants. —Just at the time that I was 
learning how to plant cabbages, the greatest efforts in 
gardening, and that for which a man got the most 
credit, were to change the nature of greenhouse and 
half-hardy plants, so as to enable them to stand the 
frost in our country. I think it was in the “ Memoirs ” 
of the Caledonian Horticultural Society that a clever 
article then appeared describing a new way of “ acclima¬ 
tising,” as the process was called, which caused a great 
stir on the other side of the Grampian range; tunnelling 
this mountain back-bone from Perth to Inverness 
would have been nothing to it now. The way the 
thing was to be done, was to bring over fine plants 
from the north of Africa, say from Morocco to Alexan¬ 
dria, sow their seeds on the northern borders of the 
Mediterranean, from Gibraltar to Athens; and when 
the plants produced seeds, they in their turn were to be 
sown more inland, and the next generation more north¬ 
ward still, and in process of time the fifth or sixth gene¬ 
ration would be fit and proper to do for themselves in 
London; and the seventh generation, always a lucky 
number, were to find their way and prosper on either 
shore of the Murray Firth. Ail this, to my own know¬ 
ledge, was firmly believed by sensible people at that 
time; but who believes it now! who, indeed. The 
Kidney Bean, the Capsicum, the Tomato, and all our 
acquaintances of that stamp, have been got yearly from 
seeds, time out of mind, in every part of our country, 
without a perceptible difference being made in their 
powers to resist the climate; and these same plants were 
all this time proving another fallacy, which, even at this 
day, finds advocates amongst our highest authorities in 
such matters, and that is, that seedling varieties in j 
course of time will revert to the parent or wild stock if | 
they are successively raised from seed. It is true there 
are some few plants which have a tendency that way 
under particular circumstances, but they are as one out 
of a thousand compared with those which, when once 
removed, if but one stage, from the wild condition of i 
the plant, no art of the gardener has yet succeeded to ! 
cause this reversion. Hence the danger, not to say the i 
folly, of drawing conclusions from inconclusive evidence, j 
or from some few isolated facts. 
But to our present purpose. Then, as no art of 
the gardener can turn the original nature of a plant, 
save by cross-breeding, nature must be assisted, and j 
half-hardy plants must be looked to in time, before we 
are overtaken by the winter. “Winter” comes in at 
the very end of our new dictionary, but wintering plants i 
will often have to be mentioned in the body of the work ; 
until many of the numbers are out, we must, therefore, 
go on in the old way, answer old questions as before, j 
But we expect to be much relieved from repeating the 
same thing over and over again as soon as the dic¬ 
tionary is completed; and we also look for an entire 
new set of questions, suggested from a great host of old 
and new ideas which we are now gathering together in 
this book. 
The oldest question of all, and the most pressing just 
now, is, “how am I to keep my geraniums, &c., &c., &c., 
this winter. I have neither greenhouse, pit, nor frame, 
and the plants have so grown in the borders that they 
will be too large to stand in the window. Last winter 
we managed to keep the young Scarlet geraniums in a 
window in ‘the passage,’ or in the ‘spare room' up 
stairs, and the windows were available for better things. 
Such plants were turned out in the borders last May, 
and after a while they looked most healthy, but now 
they are so big who can do anything with them? Might 
as well think of housing gooseberry bushes, and yet we 
are very loath to lose them, and we forgot to make cut¬ 
tings of them at the proper time; how would you or Mr. 
Beaton act if you were thus pinched ? ” Now, where 
there is neither glass nor spare windows, it is hopeless to 
try to keep verbenas over the winter; indeed, they are 
the most troublesome things in the world to keep over 
the winter without good convenience, and many other 
small, soft-wooded plants are little better; but as for 
strong Scarlet geraniums, any one may keep them with 
ordinary care, and the larger and stronger they are the 
easier it will be to keep them. The same care and 
treatment that will secure dahlias will also do for them; 
all the leaves and the soft part of the shoots must be cut 
away when the plants are taken up from the borders, ; 
then dry them partially in an open shade or somewhere j 
away from the frost, and then they are ready for stor- j 
ing; and then where potatoes can be kept in-doors, will i 
do for them also. Damp and frost, and extreme dry- I 
ness, are alike to be avoided; and by looking over them 
once a month to see that they do not suffer from either j 
of these extremes, there is no reason why any one may 
not keep lots of them. Here, where we have as many con¬ 
veniences as most people, we keep several thousands of 
these scarlets, every winter just in the same way—under 
stages planted in sand or light soil, in back sheds under 
great myrtle trees, upon dry shelves in outhouses, or, 
indeed, anywhere that is safe from frost. Their only 
advantage beyond those of the cottager being that, with 
