112 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
has one plant with four names to it; and no one can 
say if it is not four species of one genus till it blooms, 
after a few years, and proves to be just one kind of 
plant. By this time the four names may be familiar to 
every gardener in Europe and America, and no one to 
blame either, and nothing but the stern hand of the law 
can settle which of the four names will have, or should 
have, the preference. But here, for the convenience of 
the public, the botanical law is like that of the Medes 
and Persians, it altereth not; whichever of the four 
magazines published the name first has the priority of 
name, and the other three succumb without a murmur; 
and the next one which compiles a list will give the ac¬ 
knowledged name, and the other three names as syno- 
nymes. This we, in our ignorance, call humbugging 
and changing names, whereas no change at all was 
attempted, and we are even saved the mortification of 
buying this plant four times over by the very system we 
rail against. For the sake of charity, therefore, if for no 
other purpose, this part of gardening and botany wants 
to be explained as much as anything we have to do with, 
and the example I have here given is the very easiest I 
could think of; the four collectors might have been far 
asunder, and the four plants named in distant lands, 
and forgotten before they reached us : one of them, and 
the first, might have been described in China, and the 
book kept out of circulation after the author was killed, 
and all the western botanists might have named it over 
again, thus doubling the synonymes before the book in 
China came to light; yet the undeviating rule would 
allow the China book to be the true reference, and its 
name the legitimate one, and all the rest would be— not 
changed names —only unavoidable synonymes, of which 
we can never get rid with advantage to any one. There¬ 
fore, making out really good and respectable lists of any 
class of plants or seeds is not such an easy task as 
many of our country friends believe it to be. I have 
always in these pages set my face against sought-for 
compilations of mere lists of names, but never to this 
day endeavoured to show cause for so doing; but I 
hope I have said enough to convince our own readers 
that it was not from a wish to shrink from the task that 
any of us ever refused to furnish “ a list; ” and that all 
the lists admitted to our pages may be relied on with 
the greatest confidence. 1 shall fill this letter with a 
short descriptive list of nice low trees, or large shrubs, 
suitable for small places; and as opportunities offer 
shall continue them through the winter, without farther 
preface or explanation, save that I shall not confine 
myself to any one system, such as is necessarily followed 
in books; and shall begin with 
Ciiat.-eg us, our own “ Mays,” or May-thorns, among 
which are some of the very nicest things which any one 
can wish for. With the exception of the pink thorns and 
the scarlet thorns, they have all wdiite or whitish flowers; 
and then chief peculiarities are shown in then - haws or 
fruit, then- leaves, and in their style of growth. They 
are just as easily increased by budding in June or July 
as the rose, or as sure from grafting hi March and April 
as the apple and pear; and they may all be worked on 
the common hawthorn, or upon each other, with almost 
equal success ; indeed, some of the very weakest of them 
will live longer when worked on others less strong than 
the common hawthorn, because the stock and tree are 
thus more in unison with respect to constitutional habit, 
although the common practice is to work all of them on 
the freer stock. Their seeds take two years to vegetate; 
and the simplest way to get them from seeds, for the pur¬ 
pose of rearing stocks, is to gather a few handsful now 
from the nearest hedge, and to put them into a large 
flower-pot with an equal quantity of sand or mould, and 
to bury the pots in a corner of the garden till next Mi¬ 
chaelmas, then to sow them in a bed like onions, either 
broad cast, or in drills six inches apart; the latter is the 
[November 2i. 
best plan of the two, as the surface earth can be hoed | 
and stirred from time to time. About one inch is quite 
enough to bury them, either way. In three years, at 
the farthest, most of them will be fit to graft or bud; 
and budding them is the surest way. Two years might 
be saved by purchasing a lot of seedlings,—and four if 
established old plants are bought in,—and now is the 
best time: if they are planted before next Christmas 
most of them can be worked or budded next June; but, 
after all, the cheapest and surest way, to begin at the 
beginning, is to buy maiden plants at once from a 
respectable nursery, as at that age—maiden age—they 
sell them far cheaper than rose-trees. After one has 
thus a good selection of them as I intend to enumerate, j 
the sorts may be increased at home now that we know 
how to set about it. Some day, but it is far distant, 
their fruit will be as much in request at the dessert 
table as cherries are at the present day; for had it not 
been that they take a long time to grow from seeds we 
should now be dishing them up after our summer fruits 
are gone; and, if only to run experiments over a wider 
field with them, I shall mention, that I am totally at 
issue with every writer who has hitherto explained the 
best way of improving our dessert fruit. The sum 
total of the whole is this: procure the very best speci¬ 
mens that can be grown of auy fruit you intend to sow 
the seeds from, and the chances of a better sort are in 
your favour. I have for the last twenty years made 
many curious experiments in crossing a great variety of 
plants—perhaps as many as any man living,—and al¬ 
though I have no direct proof to the contrary, I firmly 
believe this creed about improving fruits— not flowers — 
has been established upon a wrong basis, or from incon¬ 
clusive data, and that the largest, the highest coloured, 
and the best flavoured peach that can be grown in 
England, has not the same chances in its favour to pro¬ 
duce a better peach from its kernel that a “ wildling” 
has. The North American farmer, who can produce 
from his open orchard as fine a peach as the best of us 
can do from our south walls and peach houses, has not 
yet been able to excel us in improving the breed of 
them with all his advantages; but, according to my 
creed, all these advantages, under the general practice, 
are just so many steps against him. But to our haws. 
Crataegus —The Thorn. The word is from hr a to s, 
strength, referring to the strength and hardness of the 
wood ; oxijcantha, meaning sharp-thomed, is the specific 
name of “ The May,” or common Hawthorn : and Haw 
itself, is derived from hage, or hag, a hedge. The most 
noticeable varieties of the common hawthorn, are the 
Weeping—a remarkable seedling raised by General j 
Monkton, at Somerford Hall, not many years back ; | 
among the weeping trees here then we have the weeping 
thorn, Queen Mary’s Thorn, or Reginte, more appre¬ 
ciated from associations, than from any distinctness it 
can claim to. The original tree was long thought much I 
of about Edinburgh; it stood in a garden which once ; 
belonged to the Regent Murray. When I saw it last, , 
I witnessed the tragedy of the unfortunate Mary’s 
escape from the Castle of Loch Leven, the same week, 
on the stage; and now I recollect the perplexities of ! 
poor Sandy MacPharlan. The Glastonbury Thorn is 
also a variety of the hawthorn; the difference being j 
that it comes into leaf very early in the spring, and 
sometimes at the end of the autumn, and therefore is 
a desirable tree for a small garden; besides the old 
legends respecting it. There are also white, black, and 
yellow berried sorts of the common thorns; the yellow is , 
the most common. I have often seen them in hedges, and 
there is one not far from here. The black fruited thorn, 
with a little encouragement at first, would make the best 
timber tree of all the thorns. There is one very elegant 
variety, called the fern-leaved- thorn, the leaves are 
longer than in the species and much cut on the edges; and 
