February 21.] 
tional cases. The great majority of cuttings require 
all the leaves that can be made to act, not, however, 
all the leaves that we may choose to leave on them, 
lor here is the error which I want to explain. Phy¬ 
siology, or the law which governs vegetable life, says, 
that the more leaves you allow on a cutting the 
sooner it will root; and when we act to the letter of 
this law we destroy cuttings by the thousand every 
season. Now this is very curious ; we know the law 
is perfectly right, and yet if we square our practice 
with it in every instance, we know, or at least ought 
to know, that our success cannot he complete. To 
explain how this is, it will be necessary to understand 
that in following out implicitly this first law we 
often violate another law which is fully as binding. 
When a cutting is made according to the first law, 
that is with all its leaves untouched, except one or 
two at the bottom, which must be removed, in order 
to leave a free space to he inserted in the cutting-pot, 
we ought to secure it from the influence of the atmos¬ 
phere, by placing a-bell-glass over it to exclude all 
air from it, except what is confined with it under the 
glass. Now, we know that thousands of plants will 
not strike roots, unless the cuttings from them are 
thus secured from the action of the air; and we know, 
too, that the more leaves such cuttings have on the 
taster they will root, just as physiology said. Let us 
now suppose th at we have no bell-glasses to guard such 
| cuttings from the air; the next best substitute is a 
hand-glass, or in the case of a single pot of cuttings, 
we can place it inside a larger pot, and if this second 
pot is deep enough to allow of the top part of the 
cuttings in the little pot to be an inch or more below 
the rim, we can place a square of glass over the mouth 
ot the large pot, and if the rim of the outer pot is so 
even, that the piece of glass touches it all the way 
round, we have a contrivance fully as good as a hand¬ 
glass, but neither of them so perfect as the bell-glass, 
as more or less air will necessarily find its way to the 
cuttings. Still, nine-tenths of all the kinds yet tried 
will root this way, without depriving them of any of 
their leaves. With this experience, gardeners have 
become so bold as to put their cutting-pots in a close 
hotbed frame at first, and more than one-half of their 
cuttings root freely enough that way; but some re¬ 
fused to do so, and such, instead of pricking up their 
ears—or rather their leaves—in this genial moist hot 
air, the greater part of them flagged down on the pots 
in a day or two. How was this to be accounted for ? 
All their leaves were left on just as physiology had 
demanded; there was plenty of heat and sufficient 
moisture; the sun did not reach them; indeed it 
could not, for to guard against such accidents as a mat 
being blown off on a sunny day, the outside of the 
glass was smeared over with lime-paint, made with 
warm water, soft-soap, and fine lime, so that the sun 
could not possibly be the cause of these leaves droop¬ 
ing. What could it be then? Such cuttings were 
never wont to go off that way when we used to have 
all the stock put under close glasses. Why they did 
so I shall explain presently, when I tell of lxow some 
amateurs, who had an ear for scientific laws, without 
the necessary knowledge of how best to apply them, 
had lost whole crops of their every-day cuttings, by 
implicitly following out the doctrine of “ the more 
leaves the more roots.” They had no better contriv¬ 
ance than the front stage of a small greenhouse to 
root their cuttings, and they had no hand or bell- 
glasses to put over them; and at that time they did 
not learn that nice contrivance of placing cutting-pots 
inside larger ones, and covering them up with a piece 
of glass, although, now-a-days, every cottager finds 
277 
that the simplest of all means to root his cuttings on 
his window-sill;—no, their cuttings were almost in a 
draught, and not a dozen out of scores of the very 
commonest kinds could they get to root. All the 
leaves would flag, and the more water they got to help 
up their drooping heads the sooner the bottoms of 
the cuttings damped or rotted off; and when the 
water was withheld, the leaves soon dried up alto¬ 
gether. In short, the whole thing was a perfect 
mystery and very disheartening. I have known, and 
do know at the present moment, some good garden¬ 
ers in many respects, who, yet, are not very successful 
propagators, just because they are too much learned 
in the law of vegetable physiology, just like those 
amateurs alluded to. To cut off a leaf from a cutting, 
or to cut any of those leaves left on through the 
middle, is with them rank heresy; no matter how 
their cuttings can be accommodated afterwards, 
leaves they must have in abundance to begin with. 
The explanation of all this is indeed very simple 
and easy to understand. We all know that a leaf under 
the free action of light and air “pumps up” the sap 
into itself in order to be digested; and if the supply is 
cut off' from below, as in the case of a detached cut¬ 
ting, the leaf has still the power of “pumping” or 
drawing to itself the juices of the cutting from any 
and all parts of it, whether above or below it. But 
when the light is excluded from the leaf, or partially 
so, and is, besides, confined from the air by—say a 
bell-glass, this power is suspended; there is no air to 
carry off the necessary evaporation from its surface, 
and there it stands fully distended by the last water¬ 
ing, or the damp air around it; and so it remains till 
roots are formed through its agency. In a close hot¬ 
bed, this action of the leaf can only be partially sus¬ 
pended, because more air is allowed access to it. 
Then, to balance against this partial action, a few of 
the leaves on a cutting are removed; but the cuttings 
on the greenhouse stage had both light and air in 
abundance, and the large volume of leaf surface, 
with hardly any check on its action, soon “pumped” 
the body of the cutting quite dry, and so proved its 
destruction. Whereas, if this surface was much re¬ 
duced, it would take longer time to dry up the juice 
of the cutting, and in the meantime roots might have 
been formed to save it. D. Beaton. 
GREENHOUSE AND WINDOW 
GARDENING. 
Giving away Plants or Cuttings: Propagating 
by Cuttings. —Many of our friends will now be 
thinking of increasing their stock of their favourite 
plants, either for their own gratification or to en¬ 
able them to fulfill promises, and make presents to 
their friends and acquaintances. I often in these 
matters bring before my mind’s eye a worthy old 
teacher, who, when describing the Latin synonymes 
signifying a gift or present , used to tell us, with 
something like a spice of sarcasm, that one word im¬ 
plied that selfish kind of present, for which the donor 
expected to be repaid by an equivalent, and some¬ 
thing more ; while the other word implied a free gift, 
for which no return whatever was expected; and 
here the good man’s eyes used to brighten, his voice 
to rise, and his full chest to heave with the benevo¬ 
lence of his nature. This latter definition of a 
present is that by which we must be actuated, if we 
would derive pleasure from giving and imparting 
satisfaction to the receiver. And this principle must 
not only be felt, but seen, otherwise men with largo 
hearts may seem to a stranger to have very little 
THE COTTAGE GAEDENER. 
