62 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
Apru. 29. 
plants which pay better for keeping over the winter than 
geraniums and calceolarias-, old petunias, under a par¬ 
ticular treatment, come in next best; some of them, 
when propagated late in the spring, are very apt to go 
off after planting, when the weather is unfavourable, 
or the situation is much exposed; and the way to 
make old plants of them go off right at first is to pro¬ 
pagate them in August from the very points of the 
young shoots, with the top bud or point cut off at the 
time of making the cuttings. I am not sure if this is 
not the best way with cuttings of them at all times, 
because if they are put into a close warm pit they grow 
on without roots for a time, and that causes the stem to 
get weak and long jointed; and you should never buy 
or plant a petunia that is long jointed next the pot, the 
least accident will snap it off between the joints, and if 
below the lowest joint you never see any more of it. 
Here, then, the stopping in the first instance becomes 
apparent to any one ; before the stopped cutting in Au¬ 
gust can extend it is rooted, and three, if not four, 
joints are ready to make so many shoots at the 
same time—so that, instead of a long-legged plant J 
getting so top-heavy in time as to break its own 
neck or leg, as it only has one leg to stand on, you 
have a bushy one from the surface of the pot or bed 
at once; then by nipping off the points again when 
the shoots made three joints a-piece, you multiply the 
shoots by arithmetical rule, and four such plants can be 
wintered in a small pot; and early in the spring all the 
tops come in for early cuttings, and then the plants 
would pay well for repotting into single pots; and 
after another crop or two of top cuttings, see what nice 
bushy plants they would be for the nurseryman who 
contracted to fill a bed of them in a very bleak part of 
the country, when his spring cuttings would do very 
well for more sheltered gardens, or where the people 
knew better how to manage them after planting. All 
this is very simple to us gardeners, because we know the 
real working of the system ; but it is another thing to 
make the public believe its own interest. We shall 
never be able to sift simpletons from the surface of 
society ; and, as long as there are gulls swarming about, 
if we are not allowed to shoot at them with powder and 
shot, in a sportsmanlike way, why we must bait our 
hooks and pull them in shore in a less straightforward 
manner. At any rate we know that there is a class of 
dealers on the look-out for such customers every day in 
the year. 
Is it not surprising that we never see the Golden 
Chain geranium advertised by any one, the scarcest 
and the very best of them all? The Dandy is the next 
nearest to it to match; this is still a scarce plant, and no 
one takes it up as a trade plant; then Lady Plymouth, 
or the Variegated Oak-leaf; how is it that we never hear 
of this one either?—it is fully as scarce as the other two ; 
then the next gem is my own seedling of last year, the 
Shrubland Pet, and I congratulate Mr. Henderson on 
being so fortunate as to have got hold of it so early; 
but my worthy friend, and fortunate successor, Mr. 
Davidson, has given it a wrong parentage; I must take 
the blame of that, however, as very likely I may have 
not explained the cross to him, not dreaming that the 
plant would have been sold. In the advertisement, 
Moore's Victory is said to be the pollen parent, but I 
have said already, that Moore's Victory never produced 
pollen with me, nor could I seed it by all the experi¬ 
ments that I could think of. The mother of Shrubland | 
Pet is lost, and so is the father; Unique and Moore's | 
Victory, had nothing to do with, but it is from the same j 
wild species (Capitatum) as Unique itself sprang from, j 
and all that race have the same trailing habit as Unique. 
If the Shrubland Pet should seed, Unique is the most ! 
likely to cross with it, and a cross from such parents I 
would be worth its weight in gold dust. It is a plant | 
that should never be planted in a large bed, nor mix 
with large flowering sorts. The Curate would make a 
near match to it, and if they were planted so, the Curate 
must have the very richest soil that can be mixed, and 
the Shrubland Pet must have it light and poor, as if 
you put it into a deep, rich bed, the leaves get too 
strong for the trusses. I put it into a rich bed last year, 
and I had to pick off many of the leaves—every ten 
days—last autumn. 
Although I have always set my face against private 
gardeners selling plants of their own raising, for fear of 
the temptation it might lead them into, I should be 
glad to hear that Mr. Henderson would sell every 
morsel of the Pet, in order that it may soon get into so 
many ways of cultivation, soils, situations, &e., that 
some one may make a lucky hit in seed in seeding it, 
as it is the only chance I know of for breaking into the 
strain of the Unique. Meantime, if I have been fortu¬ 
nate enough to enlist volunteers for improving the race 
of bedding geraniums, I would advise them forthwith to 
procure a little weed, called Geranium or Pelargonium 
capitatum, and then turn to page 289 of our last volume 
of The Cottage Gardener, to recruit their memory 
about the way of going to work with it, and where the 
history and pedigree of the Shrubland Pet is given. 
I had a letter, last autumn, from a gentleman who 
writes in our periodicals under the signature of Dodman. 
He was over on the Continent last October; saw several 
things in the gardens in Germany, which we do not 
practice here, and he wished me to notice some of them 
in The Cottage Gardener, as being worthy of imita¬ 
tion in certain localities, more especially in large places, 
where there is ample space to exhibit several styles of 
planting and grouping. He named, more particularly, 
large beds of plants put in especially for the beauty or 
singularity of their leaves, without any regard to flowers; 
Indian Shots, or Cannas, several species; Maranta 
zebrina, a stove plant with us, looks singularly in the 
open ground there, and no doubt would do the same 
here if we could take sufficient courage to trust it out- 
of-doors, in some warm, damp situation, from the end of 
June to the beginning of October; and I firmly believe 
that every species belonging to the order of Marants 
and Gingerworts, would grow most luxuriant with us in 
the autumn in the same way. I believe, also, that if 
their roots were taken up in October, just as we take up 
the dahlias, and kept dry and warm all the winter, 
we might plant them out in May, year after year, and 
that thus managed, they would look in the leaf much 
more healthy and in character than anything in the 
same way yet seen in our stoves; for it must be recol¬ 
lected that almost all the plants of these orders are 
among the “ herbaceous plants ” of the tropics in both 
hemispheres. In 1833, 34, and 35,1 had sixteen species 
of Hedychiums, five of Canna, one Curcuma, and a few 
others of the tribe that I now forget, in the open ground 
winter and summer, without losing a single plant of 
them. They were in a damp recess, in a sheltered 
border, in the shrubbery, and protected with dry leaves 
in winter; some of the Cannas flowered, the others did 
not; this was at Hatfield, in Herefordshire, not far from 
the south-west end of the Malvern Hills, the most beau¬ 
tiful spot, and the richest scenery, according to my taste, 
in all England; and I think J. C. Wheeler, of Glou- ! 
eester, who has the good sense to advertise in our 
columns, saw these plants of'tener than once. The 
Musa sapientum I often had out there all the summer; 
Renealmias also; the “ Opera Girls,” or Mantisia Sal- 
tatoria, I have not seen since I saw it in that border; 
Costus, Roscoea, and Kmnpferia, were there also; the 
common ginger plant, the Amomum and the Alpinia 
nutans, the same; but I never tried the Maranta zebrina 
out, and, indeed, I forgot all about them until “Dodman” 
reminded me of what he saw in the same style in Ger- 
