THE COTTAGE GARDENEE. 
175 
June 17. 
I 
tending the process into August, being ruled constantly 
by the amount of strength in the respective shoots. 
Currant* (lied and White ).—No delay must be allowed 
■ to take placo in pruning back the breast-wood. The 
\ ordinary garden shears is as good a weapon as any for 
this purpose, but will require to be followed by the 
knife. We take them back to within four or five inches; 
| but about this there is no necessity to be very particu¬ 
lar, only care must be taken not to reduce them so as to 
allow the sun to shine on the fruit. This would ripen 
I them prematurely, and they would be both inferior in 
J llavour and size. Those who seek a high amount of fla- 
I vour, should farther reduce the breast-shoots when the 
fruit commences colouring, still, however, leaving a 
bunch of leaves at the base of each shoot, to attract the 
sap and partially screen the fruit. 
Raspberries .—If the suckers have not been thinned, 
let it be done immediately : no gardening affair is more 
apt to be neglected than this. Many otherwise good gar¬ 
deners may be noticed leaving their rasps smothered with 
suckers through most of the season. To be sure, it may 
be generosity, but those who permit hundreds of spawny 
suckers to remain unmolested, for the sake of having a 
hundred or so canes to give to their neighbours in the 
ensuing planting season, are not the men to make the 
most of a pole of ground. Surely no man in bis senses 
will doubt that such are robbers of the fruit! Jf it could 
for a moment be supposed that they do not immediately 
detract from size in the fruit, it must at least be ad¬ 
mitted that they detract from the soil in which they 
grow, and this has, of course, an indirect influence. 
We generally reduce the suckers to about live, and pull 
away the extremely coarse and the very weak shoots, 
together with all those which ramble far from the parent 
stool. The double-bearing or autumnal kinds, too, must 
be carefully dressed; only a few of the strongest suckers 
retained. They should not be left nearer together than 
six inches by any means ; if more, all the better ; for in 
the autumnal months they require all the light and air 
possible. 
Alpine or Autumnal Strawberry .—It is to be hoped 
that every blossom has been cut away up to this time ; 
it is worse than useless to permit the plants to exhaust 
themselves prematurely. -They require all possible as¬ 
sistance in the way of regular waterings in dry weather; 
i no success may be expected without this. A mulching 
j is of much service before the blossom-stalks come forth, 
I and the mulch should be covered with slates, or some 
hard material, to keep them clean. We protest, how¬ 
ever, against the use of large slates; small pieces are 
the best, as admitting the rains or waterings to percolate 
through in a more equal way. R. Errington. 
WINTER GARDENS, AND WINTERING 
PLANTS. 
After all, and knowing the whole secret and ma¬ 
chinery by which our great exhibitions are got up and 
kept afloat, if 1 had ten thousand a year coming in, I 
would first begin by having my exhibitions at home, ac¬ 
cording to Mr. Fish’s plan. My flower-garden I would 
prefer to all the exhibitions in the world. Grapes and 
potatoes, and the like of them I could buy at the shop 
at one-half of the price I could grow them at; but all 
the shops and shows in London cannot furnish flower¬ 
beds ; and if they did, where is the grass, the gravel, 
the trees, the shrubs, and above all, the scenery to come 
from? I would have no hybrid, or hybrid-perpetual 
gardens, but I would have the real thing all the year 
round—out in the open air all the summer, aud in the 
winter comfortably under a glass covering—all my 
, specimen plants would be exhibited when the frost aud 
snow prevailed; then, instead of calling in paid judges 
to award prizes, I would make all my friends and neigh¬ 
bours the sole arbiters of my doings—open the garden 
gate to thorn the first thing after breakfast, or rather 
open the breakfast-room door, and let them step out and 
walk in amongst the choicest things I had, at once, and 
there stroll about on dry concrete walks, and among my 
camellias, azaleas, roses, geraniums, and others of my 
exhibition plants, until they were quite tired, or ready 
for luncheon. This is a new style of gardening to us 
about London, and as yet we have only one example of 
it—the large conservatory of the Rotanical Society, in 
their garden in the Regent’s Park. The large conserva tory 
at Chatsworth is too large, aud too far off, arid the one 
iu the Kew Gardens is too hot for comfort. Indeed, we 
have been hitherto too far in the wrong direction with 
all our large glass bouses; instead of endeavours to imi¬ 
tate the warm, healthy climate of Pau or Madeira, where 
the invalid could enjoy a walk or ride, we have all along 
been putting up houses, as if on purpose to make 
invalids of the strongest constitutions in the country. 
The Botanical Society’s conservatory is by far the 
best aud most comfortable in England. What the 
Crystal Palace may bo remains to be proved, but the 
pr oof is beyond all doubt in the Regent’s Park, and a 
very large number take advantage of it every winter. I 
went to see it last winter, and it happened to be a 
bracing cold day iu the shade ; but the sun was out, and 
felt cheerful about noon. On first going in, I thought 
they were going to have a fete, or some sort of gathering, 
when I saw so many people about, but I was told there 
were no more than the usual number who went there al¬ 
most daily, all the winter, to breathe the pure or purified 
air, and to take strong exercise. The house was gay with 
forced flowers; all the plants looked very healthy, the 
climbers particularly so ; but there was one part of the 
house set off to grow stove plants in, and there nobody 
seemed to care to go into. I had it all to myself for a 
long time. Now this shows quite clearly that the right 
way is not to have any stove plants there, or in similar 
places, at all, and then the annual expenses would be 
reduced one-half; but that is not the question that I am 
on at present. I merely want to give an expression to a 
very general opinion which I find among all degrees of 
gardeners, nurserymen, and also among many amateurs, 
about what is called a winter garden. This opinion has 
many boughs and branches; but they may all be 
reduced to one stem and root, aud that root is specula¬ 
tion. They say it would be an excellent speculation in 
such places as Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, Liver¬ 
pool, &c., &c., to cover so much ground with glass at a 
low figure, and to lay it out for a winter-garden, where 
the inhabitants would be admitted by paying so much 
each time they entered, or by season-tickets, without 
bothering themselves about shares, or summer shows, to 
create funds as at present in some of these places. The 
Horticultural Society has lately erected a beautiful house 
for growing roses, the best and cheapest of that class of 
buildings, so much wanted, that has yet been tried. I 
believe the society does not intend to heat it by any 
artificial means. There is another example of a cheap 
bouse in their garden, put up a few years since by Mr. 
Hartley, the great glass manufacturer, and it is some 
thing between the two that is so much talked of now for 
covering an acre, or more, for these winter gardens; all ' 
the plants, or at least the principal part of them to be J 
grown iu the free soil, and not in pots or boxes; those i 
that are thus planted in the large conservatory at the 
Regent’s Park, have answered remarkably well, and by 
varying the surface of the ground, as is done there, an 
apparent great extent is easily given to a comparatively 
small space of ground. The money that has been spent 
on ponderous iron houses of great height for stove plants 
of no sort of use, and hardly of any beauty, would bo 
