THE COTTAGE GARDENER, 
[February 28 . 
288 
The condition next in importance is a smart hot 
tom-lieat, of from 80° to 90°, to stimulate the leaves 
and young wood to the utmost of whatever power 
they may possess; and the third requirement is a 
partial shade from the rays of the sun ; what follows 
after that relates entirely to practical management. 
Those, therefore, who cannot command these 
favourable conditions, which are essentially neces¬ 
sary for success, in the case of cuttings, which are 
difficult to root—conditions, too, which physiology 
presupposed—cannot possibly succeed with cuttings 
made on this best model; when thej r are practically 
excluded from the advantages of a perfect apparatus 
for their propagation. Hence, it follows, that instead 
of making our cuttings, under all circumstances, ac¬ 
cording to the best rules, we ought rather to prepare 
them according to our means, for their future ma¬ 
nagement—and so reduce their leaves according to the 
quantity of air which must necessarily reach them 
where they are set for propagation; and here lies the 
whole secret of propagation. The proverb of “cut¬ 
ting according to your cloth,” cannot be better illus¬ 
trated than in the light preparation of cuttings; if 
we cannot exclude the air from them, we must cut 
away part of their foliage; and how much ought to 
be so cut, depends on the quantity of air, so to speak, 
which can reach them, and on the nature of the cut¬ 
ting itself; for there is an immense difference in the 
constitution of plants with respect to their power of 
forming roots from cuttings. 
Although the art of propagation is as familiar to 
the great body of gardeners as the process of plant¬ 
ing cabbages, there are many good gardeners, and a 
greater number of expert young men in other 
branches, who, with the greatest care, make but a 
sorry hand at increasing plants by this process. 
When we turn to the practical part of propagation, 
we meet with more degrees of comparative merit 
than the grammarians ever dreamed about: good, 
bad, and indifferent propagators give but a faint 
idea of how these things are managed, or misma¬ 
naged. We must, therefore, walk in amongst them, 
and judge for ourselves from their productions. Here 
is an honest, hard-working fellow, who knows as 
much about the philosophy of his operations as I do 
about the “ Milky Way,” and yet, by a long course of 
plodding industry, has acquired the exact manipula¬ 
tion necessary to insure the rooting of all the kinds 
of cuttings he is required to produce; and his only 
fault, or rather his misfortune, is that he cannot pos¬ 
sibly tell how a new plant ought to be treated before¬ 
hand. He must first experiment on it. Now, a little 
fire-side philosophy would be of immense use to him, 
and he knows it. But his next door neighbour has 
too much philosophy, which makes him so confident 
that he overlooks the necessity of constant attention, 
without which no man has ever gained much credit 
in this line. He not only neglects his cuttings, as 
any one may see by those withered leaves in his cut¬ 
ting pots, the gaps in. others, and the general mouldi¬ 
ness of many of the rest, but, with his bad propa¬ 
gating place, he must needs make all bis cuttings in 
the first style of his art, which, of course, aggravates 
his misfortunes. 
But enough ; the means of commanding success 
in propagation lie in a small compass: attention to 
small matters and vigilance are the mainsprings. No 
matter how many thousands of cuttings one has to 
attend to, he ought to see every one of them at least 
once a day, and that as early in the morning as possi¬ 
ble. A practised eye will soon run over a thousand 
cuttings, and detect what is amiss with any of them ; 
but this can never be done from books, nothing short 
of actual practice for a short time can enable one to 
see the symptoms of disease and danger; but all of 
us may learn to keep our frames, glasses, cutting-pots 
and cuttings, with mould, sand, and tallies, in a per¬ 
fectly clean and tidy condition, and when we do, half 
the battle is won already. The least appearance of 
mouldiness in any part of a cutting place, must be 
checked as soon as it appears, for of all the dangers 
incident to a bed of cuttings, this is certainly the 
one to be most dreaded. And one of the most usual 
ways of inducing this mouldiness is the use of green 
wood for making the tallies or number sticks; for 
every pot must have its own label, if you only rear 
two pots of any kind of which you possess more than 
one variety. No sooner is a bit of green or sappv 
wood subjected to a close damp atmosphere, than it 
begins to mould at the surface of a pot, and if over¬ 
looked but for one day, will assuredly kill some of 
the cuttings. As soon as a leaf, or part of a leaf, is 
damped oft', or covered with the mould fungus, that 
leaf or the part must be cut away; and for this part 
of the business nothing is so good as a pair of long 
pointed scissors, such as we use for thinning grapes 
with; and the most slovenly way is to maul over them 
with the finger and thumb. 
Watering Cuttings. —The old receipt of “ often, and 
little at a time,” by which so many thousand plants 
have been destroyed, is still the best to follow with re¬ 
spect to cuttings. They are inserted so shallowly in 
the pots, that even when they are so far advanced as to 
have formed a few roots, if a couple of inches at the 
top is kept moist, it will be more safe than if the 
whole ball is wetted through. The rule is, that the 
top of the pots ought not to be dry for many hours at 
a time; and where many are to be attended to there 
ought to be a very small pot kept on purpose for them; 
and the mouth of the spout can hardly be too small 
for them; but as such a spout is of little use after 
the cutting season is over, 1 have found the following 
plan very useful:—Take a stick, about three or four 
inches long, and drive it firmly into the spout, but 
not so as to fill it as if corked; "the stick must be fiat 
on two sides, so as to allow a small space on either 
side to discharge the water—the two currents will 
meet at the outer end of the stick, and ought then to 
be as thick as if discharged through a large quill; 
with this contrivance you can water the smallest 
pot with ease, and without displacing any of the 
sand. A small rose-pot would answer the same pur¬ 
pose, but it often happens that only one pot, or one 
here and there,require water when you go over them ; 
and if the pots are very close together, you can 
hardly water with a rose without letting some fall on 
neighbouring pots, whether they want it or not; but 
with the spout thus reduced you can supply the re¬ 
quisite quantity with the greatest nicety; and the 
moment the cuttings are done with, the stick may be 
withdrawn till the next moring; for recollect the 
cutting-bed is to be looked over every morning, with¬ 
out exception, and if only one pot out of a score 
needs water, it must have it. And in the afternoon 
of fine days, as soon as the shading is removed, give 
a slight watering all over the bed—pots, cuttings and 
all; and in dull weather it often happens that this 
kind of watering may do for a whole week. 
Seeds. —Except of the very hardiest annuals, T 
sow very few seeds for the flower-garden till the first 
and second weeks in March. But to have Sweet peas 
for cut flowers from the middle of May till the frost 
stops them in the autumn, I sow a row now, and a 
few dozens of pots to be half-forced ; another sowing 
