212 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[January 2. 
at commencement, rising to 55° 1 »y the time the vines 
are in blossom; afterwards do not exceed 00°. On very 
j dull days, and during severe weather, descend to the 
j night heat during the day. Whatever sudden advances 
! in heat are made over 70°, let it he for two or three 
: hours after closing time p.m., and mostly by means of 
! solar heat. It may on such occasions safely rise to 85°. 
Kinds. —Wo think the Black Hamburgh is the most 
| general favourite; some, however, succeed well with the 
Muscat of Alexandria. The Muscadines answer very 
well; aud wo have seen very good Erontignans in pots. 
Insects. —As soon as pruned their stems may be 
dressed thoroughly with the following mixture:—Dis¬ 
solve two ounces of soft soap in a gallon of warm water; 
add three kaudsful of sulphur, and about a quart or 
three pints of lime. Stir the whole well while using it. 
We conclude with one more wholesome piece of 
1 advice. Never suffer the air of the house to be charged 
I with atmospheric moisture when the sun is shining. 
Vines will scald sooner at 75° thus situated than at 90° 
j with a dry ah-. R. Eriungton. 
THE ELOWER-GARDEN. 
Garden Walks. —I have said that garden walks may 
be made of any thing but gravel, which will bind, or 
concrete,—from oyster-shells to granite ; and now I add, 
that they may be made also with gravel alone, concreted 
without any of these substances; but roads for very heavy 
weights are best, if they are constructed without gravel; 
or with only just enough of it to make the body bind, 
as mortar is used for building a house. Here, where we 
have abundance of good gravel on both sides of the 
house and garden, aud within less than half a mile off, 
they did not use a particle of fresh gravel in making the 
approach road, which I instanced as having had to 
undergo the severest trial that any road could be put to, 
as soon as it was finished. The old road was broken up, 
the gravel turned right and left, then sifted; the stones 
and the roughest portions of the gravel, that is, particles 
from the size of a marrow pea upwards, retained to make 
the new road with; and the small gravel, such as one 
would use for the top of a garden walk, was carted away 
to fill inequalities about the ground, except perhaps a 
tenth part to form the concrete for binding the road. 
This is the oldest kind of road we have on record,—so 
: that what I have said,or am going to say, on the subject I 
j is almost as old as the hills, or at any rate a groat deal j 
' older than Romulus himself, who is said, in our school- j 
1 books, to have been the founder of Rome. And the | 
Roman writers do not disguise the fact, that they bor- | 
rowed their gardening and agriculture, their irrigation, 
their vineyards, or orchards—and may I not add their j 
1 road-making and their garden walk-making?—from the \ 
I Carthaginians; and who can prove that the streets of 
j Carthage were not made on the self-same plan as this j 
very road that I am writing about? At any rate the 
Romans introduced concrete road-making into England; 
and where they could not get large stone flags to cement : 
together for a roadway, they made the road entirely of 
small stones, sand, and lime, but of such thickness as 
would now ruin us. The only novelty, therefore, that 
will bo found in my plan is the small quantity of mate¬ 
rials that are necessary to make as good a road as ever 
was done in the luxurious suburbs of either Carthage or 
! Rome. Six inches in depth, on a soft clay bottom, can 
be made to carry loads of five tons’ weight in narrow¬ 
wheeled carts, waggons, or trucks; and over a very dry 
gravelly or porous dry earth, such as one would choose 
to build a house on. A road only four inches in thick¬ 
ness will carry the same weight, if properly put together. 
The question, therefore, is narrowed to this—which is 
the best materials for wear and tear, or to stand against I 
the friction of the wheels and the tread of horses? 
The Romans used basalt stones for making their roads, 
in places where they must have carried them from a 
long distance, and where they could procure stones hard 
enough, to all appearance, on the spot; and those of us 
who are not thus particular, may use any hard stones 
which we can procure cheapest,—from the sea shore, or 
river side, from a gravel pit, or from the fanner who 
gathers them in the spring from his grass lands,—and, 
in nine cases out of ten, this kind of mixed stones is 
the best of all for forming a road with ; and such were 
the kinds of stones used for the road which I have 
introduced, not as a model, but to explain the way I 
would have all roads and walks within parks and plea¬ 
sure grounds constructed. 
1 have said that a large quantity of soil had to be 
removed in front of the mansion, lmudreds of loads of 
which were spread about on the grass in the park, and 
on both sides of the new road, or rather the. old road, for 
; it was not touched then. After the rains washed down 
i this earth there was a large quantity of stones left, from 
the size of an ostrich's egg—or as large as my two fists 
put together—down to the size of a robin’s egg. A lot 
of little boys soon collected these into heaps, and that, 
with the stone sifted from the old gravel bed of the road, 
made the new road, and some hundred yards of another 
road besides. The binding material was chalk, except 
for eighteen inches on each side of the road, the sides 
being put together with chalk lime, so that, as I said 
last week, the sides were made stronger than the centre, 
in order to resist the strong currents of rain water 
which must pass right down the road until the building 
and alterations about the house were finished, when 
drains and drainage would come to be considered. This 
piece of road is in the most difficult part of the park to 
form a road, and the road itself was an experiment from 
first to last; and the original intention was to lay on an 
inch of concreted gravel after all the rough traffic was 
over, or say after twelve months; but 1 believe that idea 
of making the road six inches thick is now abandoned, 
and that it will stand at five inches; and bo kept well 
painted, as our men call gravelling the surface of our 
walks. We first make the walks of concrete, and keep 
them coloured witli gravel, as people keep their door 
and window frames coloured with paint; sometimes a 
i door or a window frame goes two or three years without 
painting, and it is just so with these walks; only, for 
the look of the thing, we colour our walks here annually 
at the end of spring. Like paint, which if laid on 
wood out in the sun too thick blisters, so with gravelling 
these walks : we can only just cover them, and this coat 
we call the eighth of an inch, so it must be fine ; aud, 
like a coatof paint, it ought to have the old coat removed 
first from below it. The only difference between paint¬ 
ing on wood and painting with gravel is this, that oil 
painters choose a dry surface for their coats, and we with 
the gravel damp the surface, if it happens to be very dry 
at the time we wish to put the gravel on. 
The best walks in the flower-garden here have only 
one fourth of an inch of clean gravel on the top; and 
some of them, after being in use for six years, are now 
as good as the first day they were made ; and, if it were 
needed, any length of them could be made, by this way 
of colouring, to look as if the walk was only made the 
week before. Where gravel is very dear, I would never 
use more of it in making a road or walk than one inch, 
and I could do in cither case with half that thickness; 
that is, if I could get a cheaper article to bind together 
into a solid body. I can see no objection to any of the 
materials that have been in use, or recommended, for 
making the bottom, or body, of walks with, except brick¬ 
bats on a wet bottom. On a dry bottom they will pass 
muster, if nothing better can be had; but I do not think 
that a good walk, at least a cheap walk, can be made 
