256 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
July 22. 
must come direct from the body of the old wood, with¬ 
out the agency of a visible bud. There are other plants, 
no doubt, that would yield well under the same system, 
but experiments enough have not yet been tried to esta¬ 
blish the fact. The Grape vine cannot be said to have 
proved either way, and it never will prove the question, 
because we know full well already, that this close prun¬ 
ing will all but kill a vine on some soils, while, on the 
other hand, it is the safest way to insure a healthy plant 
and a large crop on other soils. All this I have seen 
proved over and over with my own eyes. My friend, i 
Mr. Salter, the great champion cucumber grower of | 
England, would prune his vines until the rods were as : 
smooth as whipcord ; these bare rods would come clus- i 
tered with full loaded bunches from the very bottom, all 
the way up, and on both sides, as regularly as you could 
set them by measurement; and not five miles off, others j 
would lose two-thirds of their crop by the same process, 
and some more than that. Not so the Euchsia, how¬ 
ever; I never heard of one losing a flower by the closest 
pruning. The old soil must be kept to the roots of such 
Fuchsias all the winter, and until they break into leaf; 
then it is all shaken off, as they do for Geraniums, but 
the main roots are never touched , only the small fibrous 
ones, which are probably dead or nearly so. After pot¬ 
ting, a close moist heat and a gentle bottom heat for six 
weeks would make a wonderful difference in their rapid 
growth, but it is not quite essential to success;—if the 
place is kept close for ten days or a fortnight to en- ! 
courage root action, as the fruit-growers say, it will be 
enough. Thus, by pruning at different seasons, from 
October to February, and by potting from February to 
May, with a little forcing early in spring, country gar¬ 
deners have them for all uses from May to November, 
and from July to September they are in prime order for 
the exhibitions. 
Achimenes. —I was highly pleased with this, the next 
most useful tribe of easily-grown plants, after the 
Fuchsias, at this show. For some years, I know, from 
personal intercourse with the judges, they despaired of 
seeing a well-grown Achimenes produced for competition; j 
and was it not for the collection at Ivew, where they 
might be seen in beautiful bloom early in May, and at 1 
the Duke of Devonshire’s, Chiswick Gardens, where Mr. 
Edmunds used to have whole rows of the blue A. longi¬ 
fiora ready for the July calls, country gardeners would j 
go home laughing in their sleeves at the Londoners for 
their abortive attempts at cultivating this sportive 
family. When a society offers a five-guinea medal for 
so-and-so, and the judges cut the medal into five parts, 
giving only the fifth part to the exhibitor, he may rest 
assured that that part is only as much as to say—we 
wish to encourage the so-and-so as much as the society 
do, but you have only done a fifth part of what might 
have been done, and what we all do at home—here is a 
sprat for you this time, perhaps the herring will come 
I next season. “The sprat to catch the herring” was 
j never better exemplified than on this occasion with the 
j Achimenes. Beautiful as the wild species are, and 
much as botanists feai-ed the stains of mule blood on tbe 
character of the race, whatever may be said about the 
effects of free-trade on the flour of the wheat and barley, a 
free intercourse with the pollen-flower of the Achimenes 
has already done more to advance them into higher 
favour than the most sanguine of us anticipated five j 
years ago; and here, too, judging from the hard names of ; 
the newer seedlings, the foreigners reap the advantages 
of this kind of intercourse. Our English longifiora alba 
is eclipsed by the French, or at least French-named, 
Margaretta; but this is a sad and most blundering 
name for so beautiful a flower, because it comes so near 
to the French way of pronouncing their name for the 
China aster. If you were to accost a lady of fashion, and 
say you had a Margaretta Achimenes to dispose of, her 
ladyship would ring the bell immediately to get disposed 
of one, whom she might well be excused for mistaking 
for a daft dealer. This may seem a trifle to those who 
know not the ways of the world; but 1 have known the 
question—“What'sin a name?” answered by a fifty- 
pound note on the value of a seedling plant, and on 
both arms of the scales. Margaretta is a pure white 
Achimenes, and longifiora alba a bluish-white ; Warse- 
uizii is a charming seedling, the lighter blue of the longi¬ 
fiora breed, and the best grown and best trained plant 
in the exhibition, in a pot—nearly a yard through, 
and not more than ten inches high. Klezii is one of the 
most singular seedlings I remember to have seen; it is 
from longifiora. The flowers are, perhaps, larger, but 
in colour more like those of tbe Indian balsam, called 
Latifolia, than anything else—or between that and the 
colour of the Shrubland rose Petunia. One called 
Patens major is the richest in colour of all the family as 
here represented; longifiora mag or the finest blue. For¬ 
mosa, and Goccinea major are the best of the old Cocci- 
nea breed. Baumania hirsuta looks like a Petunia on a 
dwarf plant of Hirsuta; it is the best of that class, and 
Lipmannii is of the breed of Venusta, with flowers twice 
the size; altogether they deserve the highest praise, 
and they also shew how desirable it is to go on crossing 
them. Get the high colour of the old Goccinea into 
these large flowers, and my word for it, you will soon 
get above the great geranium raisers. 
From Sion House we had a fine specimen of Nelum- 
bium speciosum in a tub of fresh water, with one large 
flower open, another in tbe bud, and a third scope or 
stalk, crowned with a seed-pod in the form of a trun¬ 
cated cone; the broad end uppermost, and filled with 
holes, in each of which a single seed or nut is found; 
these seeds are supposed to be the sacred beans of 
Pythagoras, and the soft stalks are used as food by the 
poor among the Chinese population. The Nelumbiums 
are easily known from the Water lilies, which they much 
resemble, by the shape of these seed-pods, by their 
having only one seed in every division or carpel of tbe 
seed-cone, or by other signs less easily seen or made 
out. We had also an immense Humea elegans, ten or 
twelve feet high, with a dozen main leaders, and twice as 
many side-flowering spikes ; altogether making a noble 
specimen out of a very common plant. 
Of other plants not often seen in public, we had 
Curcuma cordata, and Roscbeana; two canna-like dwarf 
plants; the first with coppery-red and yellow flowers, and 
the second having them of a bluish tint. AF.chmea 
fulgens, a fine stove plant of the pine-apple or Bromel- 
wort class, having the flower spike, the flower stalks or 
pedicels, as well as the buds and flowers themselves of a 
bright coral colour, and the tips of the flowers marked 
with blue, making altogether a most beautiful combina¬ 
tion from such a rough looking plant. The beautiful 
Vriesia speciosa was there also, under a wrong name— 
Tillandsia splendens; it had only one spike of bloom, 
like the spike of some gladiolus just before the blossoms 
open, and all of a shining orange-scarlet; the plant is 
one of the most beautifully marked in the leaves of all 
the order—broad black bands across the green or ground 
colour. My neighbour, Mr. Jackson, of Kingston, grows 
this plant better than any one in England, and the 
secret is this—to keep the hollow of the leaves con¬ 
stantly full of soft water during the growing season, and 
to allow it a comparatively small pot, as the roots are 
very scanty and weak; but the rest I must put off till 
another day. D. Beaton. 
JOTTINGS. 
Sulphur. —This extremely hot weather has given the 
red spider a chance under circumstances wherein he 
has otherwise scarcely ever showed himself. I have 
