Februaby 27.] 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
you cover them, except two or three inches at each end, 
and your truck is finished, except the rollers ; the upper 
surface of it being just four inches from the ground 
(three inches the ribs, and one inch the boards laid 
across); the ends of the middle rib need not project like 
the side ones; saw them off. The rollers should be nine 
or ten inches in diameter, and should be placed a foot 
from each end of the truck, and when the whole is 
finished, the top of the truck will not be quite a foot 
from the ground; so that it can be pushed under a tree, 
or stone, or anything else you wish to carry on it, by 
making a passage under it a foot deep ; and it is a very 
handy thing about a place for many things. If it had 
moveable sides, you might carry a horse-load of soil, or 
any thing with it, across the lawn to flower-beds, if the 
horse was in boots. Rut we have not got the rollers 
fixed yet. They are made the exact width of the truck, 
and say, ten inches in diameter; fouriuches at eacli end 
are then reduced to the diameter of eight inches, and a 
space of four inches is then reduced in the centre of each 
roller, and nearly five inches in depth; this space is to 
allow room for the centre rib to fall into, and to allow 
of the rollers working freely without the middle rib 
touching them. The two outside ribs are scolloped out 
a little over the reduced ends of the rollers, so as to allow 
them to bed in, as the carpenters say; this scollop 
is in form of an arch, and no more than an inch deep 
at the crown of the arch. When the truck is in motion, 
the reduced ends of the rollers turn round in these 
openings in the side ribs—wood working against wood ; 
and, by keeping the wood axles greased, they work as 
free as if they were polished iron, and they seem to last 
much longer than iron axles would do under the same 
work. Ry looking at the truck from either end, when 
it is in motion, you would think that each roller was in 
two pieces, owing to the space cut out of the middle 
of it. The way the rollers are fastened to the ribs is 
very simple and strong ; a piece of iron, about the 
width and thickness of the rim of a carriage-wheel, 
bowed near the middle to clasp round the end of the 
roller, is screwed, behind and before the roller, into the 
ribqnece,—not unlike the way some barrow-wlieels are 
fastened; the outer end of this iron is continued out to 
the end of the rib-piece, and then formed into a ring, 
to hook the traces or ropes to for drawing it along, and 
to make it all the stronger. These ends are wound 
round with hoop-iron, just behind the rings. From all 
this, I think, the merest hedge-carpenter could put up 
a planting truck, if he had a lathe to turn the rollers, 
and pieces of rough iron hoop, to fasten them. 
Harry Moore is our planter-in-chief here, among fo¬ 
rest trees; he has been at it, every winter, these twenty 
years and more; first, under Mr. Lovett, the old gar¬ 
dener, but, for a long time on his own account, and is 
not too old to be taught any new improvement iu the 
way of planting. I would back him to remove a full- 
grown tree against any planter I ever heard of; and he 
says, this truck, and tiiis way of planting, is by far the 
best and easiest, for men, and horses, trees, and all. 
The plan of tunneling under large trees belongs to him ; 
he has planted that way for the last six or seven years, 
but he owns he took the idea from seeing roots prepared 
that w'ay iu the garden where he works during the 
summer. The truck was made for him after he failed, 
iu one or two instances, to carry very large trees on a 
sledge with five horses. He has a set of chains, by 
which he can fasten a tree to the four corners of the 
truck before he starts; and what with the weight of the 
ball, and the help of these chains, his trees go across 
the park just as they stood, and are never off the per¬ 
pendicular, except at the moment of planting. There 
are no heavy lifts, or straining, at this kind of planting, 
and the men prefer the work to planting small trees 
from the nurseries; and when the wind is high, or the 
333 
tree top-heavy, he uses two guide ropes, fastened near 
the top, one on each side, to steady the tree as they_ go 
along, a couple of his men holding each rope. To finish, 
as I began, these letters on planting, let me again urge 
on those who have not had practice in this kind oi 
work, not to attempt to remove any tree that is above 
ten years planted, till next autumn, but to have the 
roots prepared forthwith. 
From planting large trees and truck-making, let me 
free, for one short paragraph, to hunt up a beautiful i 
Spanish bulb, one of the prettiest of the season, easier j 
to find than the Crocuses of Spain, and, like them, | 
everybody’s flower, and as pretty as any crocus can be, j 
and not unlike them in colour; it was described by 
Clusius more than two hundred years since, bub strange 
to say, it has never yet been iutroduced into England. 
If we can re-introduce Yellow Geraniums from the south 
of Africa, surely we can get over a beautiful bulb from 
Spain, if we go the right way about it. I was looking 
over some old memorandums the other night, to get 
ready for our new Dictionary (about which it is very 
gratifying to us all to hear such favourable reports), and 
there I met with the name of this Spanish bulb, and a 
pretty sounding name it is —Lapicdra Placiana ; the 
most couspicuous bulb belonging to the Spanish flora. 
It has leaves like the Yellow Amaryllis, which blossoms 
with us in the autumn—the Oporanthm of botanists— 
and a white band down the middle of each, like 
that in the leaves of Hippeastrum si ricitifolium. The 
flower-stalks support from six to eight beautiful white | 
starry blossoms, something in the way of a white crocus 
flower, or a Hypoxia. A variegated bulb with such 
flowers would be a great acquisition to us. Any one 
looking for it might know it at first sight, without i 
being iu flower—the variegated leaf is enough. II I ! 
were a nurseryman, I would rather have a thousand 
bulbs of Lapiedra to dispose of than a large bundle of 
Spanish Bonds! It grows among stones, and in the 
clefts of rocks, and Lagasca, a professor of botany in 
Madrid, says it grows near the Church of San Fuen, 
near Agesiras, and near Malaga, also on the stony 
heights above Valencia, so that it may easily be ob¬ 
tained. D. Beaton. 
GREENHOUSE AND WINDOW 
GARDENING. 
When shoux.d Plants be Repotted? —The compre¬ 
hension of a principle on which an operation is based, 
is of great importance, both as respects successful 
result, and as conveying to the operator a degree of 
intellectual pleasure. Practice, then, instead of being a 
matter of mystery, and hap-hazard routine, becomes 
allied to, and identified with, scientific induction. From 
the correspondence we are permitted to see, our friends, 
young in gardening, are apt to fall into two opposite 
errors; one party requiring all, the very simplest, ope¬ 
rations to be detailed respecting the culture of their pet 
plant, and troubling themselves little about the prin¬ 
ciple; whilst another class require, above all things, the 
rationale of operation, to the comparative neglect of 
those minutiae of detail, attention to which constitutes 
no mean element of success. In the case of those indi¬ 
viduals far better acquainted with general science than 
it is possible for us to be, this second error is apt to 
arise from a difference between a science bearing upon 
unorganized material, and a similar science having 
reference to organized existences,—these being divided 
into numerous groups and families, possessing many 
general analogies, but greatly varied in character, and 
requiring, for their full development, separate features of 
management—features which cannot be discovered by 
theoretical principles, unless these are associated with 
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