02 THE COTTAGE GARDENER. [October 31. 
talk, or soft sawdur as Sam Slick would say, goes farther j 
with it than all the big words in the dictionary. At any 
rate, whether at home or at the nursery, we can never 
lay too much stress—in these pages—on the matter of 
taking great care of the roots of all kinds of plants when 
they are removed. A gentleman sent us a letter the 
other day, or rather a little slip of paper, twice written 
over or “ crossed,” and all we could make of it was, 
that he, or his man, or somebody else, had cut the roots 
of something very sadly; and, probably, there was a 
request about what was to be done with it, but all that 
was unintelligible with the “crossing;” and we may 
write our pens into stumps without being able to write 
down the careless practice of handling roots, as if they 
were made out of old ships’ cables. 
In the flower-garden, the first planting of the season j 
always begins, or should begin, with the ruses; and this I 
season they are more fit for early planting than I re- j 
member to have seen them, except at the eud of 1846 , 
and again, just twenty years before, at the end of 1820 . 
Last Michael mas-day I pruned a great number of dwarf 
plants in the rosary, which were quite ripe for the 
knife: this was to cause them to grow much stronger 
next season ; the next day I budded thirty-two rose- 
stocks—six of them were budded in September, and 
failed; and the rest -were not fit for budding in Septem¬ 
ber, because the bark would not rise. The rains at the 
end of the month put them all right, but the budding 
was more for the say of the tiling than for use or profit; 
but I dare say most of them will take. Well, the very 
next day I transplanted the row of roses of which I 
said, a month back, that I cut them, or pruned them, for 
experiment, leaving only a shoot to each for fear they 
should “ bleed;” when I pruned them their tops were as 
green as leeks, but the bottoms of the shoots were as 
dry and hard as one could wish; and I am quite sure, 
already, that the plan of pruning back many kinds of 
trees and bushes at the beginning of October, so as to be 
ready for transplanting by the end of the mouth, or very 
early in November, would answer remarkably well. 1 
have been at this land of work a good deal since last 
July, to keep “a-liead” of our planting; for I may as 
well say, that since we began transplanting the box-trees 
last June we have been at it, more or less, every week 
since ; and if anybody wants to know when all this 
planting is to be finished, I must refer him to Mr. 
Barry, the great architect, who will also be called the 
great planter some of these days. Old gardener as I 
am, he taught me a lesson or two that I could not learn 
from all the books on gardening put together,—so much 
so, indeed, that if I wanted five hundred rose-trees from 
Mr. Rivers, next season, I would go to the Sawbridge- 
wortli Nursery at the end of September, look out the 
sorts, and see them close pruned before I left the grounds; 
then I should know that they would be ready for me any 
time after the end of October ; and I should not be in a 
great hurry, or in a great fright, if I did not get them 
home before the end of next Eebruary, as no other 
customer would think them good enough, even if Mr. 
Rivers offered them. 
Now, I shall tell a tale about roses, which T hope will 
cause a great sensation,—at least, it caused me a great 
deal of surprise. I had a letter the other day, with a 
queen’s head inside, without going through our business 
office at all, from a gardener whom I once knew slightly. 
He told me he was with a lady of title; that they were 
to plant five hundred standard roses in the kitchen- 
garden, along both sides of a centre walk, so many 
yards long; praised The Cottage Gardener, of course, 
and on the strength of his getting it for two-pence a 
week, wanted me to make him out a list, and arrange 
the five hundred roses for him. Now, if this man threat¬ 
ened to do me some grievous bodily harm, should I not 
be justified in summoning him before the Lord Mayor? 
I am quite sure he is dreaming or making a noise on his 
pillow nine times out of ten before I sit down to write 
these letters ; and, moreover, he is one out of a section— 
a small section, I hope—who think that because he 
subscribes to The Cottage Gardener we are indebted 
to him; whereas the debt, and a heavy debt it is, too, is 
just on the other side of the ledger. Certainly, it is very 
gratifying to us who burn the midnight oil, for our owii 
good in the first instance, and for the good of our coun¬ 
trymen, to find that so many people buy and praise The 
Cottage Gardener. Yea, our vanity is often in danger of 
getting fanned by what is said of its; but taking all into 
the account, and allowing compound interest, still tire debt 
is on the reader’s, side of the account. 
After the roses, the next class of flower-garden plants 
which I shall mention will be the half-hardy kinds from 
different parts of the world. The severe cold we ex¬ 
perienced last spring taught us many things in this line. 
Many of this class which go through a hard winter with 
little danger, if they happen to be in poor dry soil, are 
fearfully cut-up, or rather down, after they move in the 
spring, if the weather sets in hard ; and the damage is 
much aggravated after spring planting; here we lost four 
hundred roses in one or two nights at the eud of March, 
every one of which were thought quite hardy, but they 
were only transplanted six weeks before. Last May and 
June we were besieged with letters asking how to deal 
with dying and dead plants from the same cause—spring 
planting. New plants are thus set down as only half- 
hardy, whereas, if better managed, their real hardihood 
would have been established ere this time. And what 
more shall I say against spring planting; what, indeed, 
but that all the recent introductions from Mexico and 
California, from China and Japan, should not be trans¬ 
planted at all in the spring till we learn more about them; 
plant them now, or else put them off till the dahlias are 
being set out next May; if these and others of a rather 
tender nature are removed now from the nurseries they 
receive a check, and will yet ripen a good deal before 
Christmas, or at least will have their juices so much 
dried up by the check, that they will have all the chances 
in their favour to stand against a hard or long winter, 
and the effects of our variable spring weather. New 
comers that have been planted within the last few years, 
and are now in rampant growth, should be root pruned 
forthwith, which will have nearly the same effect as 
transplanting. The tops of succulent growths should 
also be well cut in before the frost overtakes them ; it is 
a sad mistake to suppose that a few inches or feet cut off 
by the frost do no harm, if the parts below are ripe and 
not apparently affected; the whole system from top to 
bottom gets a shock and a chill that may cripple a plant 
for years, which might be avoided by a judicious use of 
the knife and spade, and the early frosts always do the 
most damage. I have known a fuchsia killed to the last | 
root by an early frost, when one just as tender and not a 
yard from it escaped, merely because the latter happened 
to have been cut down to the ground some weeks pre¬ 
viously ; and I think it is best to cut down all the more 
tender fuchsias to the ground before the frost sets in, and 
if they or any other soft wooded plant bleed much by 
this early cutting, I think it is rather an advantage than ' 
otherwise, because all tbejuiceslostt.bat way at this season 
can do no harm to the next growth : the roots and crown 
of the plants are drier by the discharge, and there will 
be time enough for the roots to gather up more moisture 
long before leaves can appear to make use of it. This is 
a very different case from the roses I was so anxious to 
keep from bleeding, when I pruned them at the end of 
September; my object then was to get the bottom eyes 
well filled, as well as tbe shoots and roots, to enable 
them to push up vigorously next season, and to form 
new roots more effectively in the meantime; but now 
the object is to get rid of all the moisture and sap we can, 
