January 19. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
297 
A close examination of all store roots should take 
place as soon as possible, and these should be all turned 
over and picked. Beets will have sprouted, aud Par¬ 
snips, Carrots, &c., should have all sprouts and roots 
rubbed away. It is a capital plan to spread them in 
the sun and wind for several hours to kill the young 
fibres, and then to store them again. Kidney , or other 
early Potatoes, in early frames, may be placed in simple 
layers in boxes, first putting a layer of leaf-soil in the 
bottom, and sticking their ends in it; they may then 
be introduced to heat to sprout, but it will be well to 
cover them over their crowns with very fine manurial 
matter, which will cause them to produce strong sprouts. 
Such may be planted with fine sprouts three inches in 
length, in prepared beds, in the middle of February, 
and will, with proper attention, probably be found 
earlier than those planted at once in hotbeds in the end 
of December. 
I may first mention, in addition to what I had pre¬ 
viously stated with regard to the weather, that the ther¬ 
mometer, whilst I finish these observations, January 8, 
six o’clock, p.m., may be quoted about 3°; but as I do 
not place extreme reliance on my glass, it is not impro¬ 
bable that we may hear of its being below zero in some 
places. 
It is not improbable that this weather may be fol¬ 
lowed by cutting winds, if so, it is fearful to contemplate 
the havoc amongst vegetables, tender trees, &c. This 
weather will also put some of our so-called hardy 
new shrubs and trees to the test, and w r ill tend to 
purge some of our trade catalogues of over-glowing 
descriptions. R. Errington. 
PRACTICAL PRUNING. 
When a child is born high up in the world, I mean, 
up among the hills, the boy or girl is so far apart from 
other boys or girls, that a great deal is to be learned 
from the natural bent of the mind and body; add to 
this, that when the grown-up people gather together, as 
to a wedding, or a dance, or at sheep-shearing, or at 
“ marking the lambs,” or on any other common occa¬ 
sion, the boys and girls are put out of the way lest 
they should be troublesome; besides, these high born 
little ones are never allowed little high chairs to sit at 
table, they must take their porridge elsewhere, as it 
happens; so, as I have just hinted, they have no chance 
to learn much from doing what they see others do, for 
they do not see them at their doings. I believe, that if 
a dull child, say a boy, were left on an island where 
there was no one but himself, but where there were 
plenty of birds and animals, that he would learn two 
things, at least, that are prized in civilized life; he 
would learn to like flowers, and he would learn to 
dance from what he saw around him. No great credit 
thus for highlanders being such good natural dancers, 
yet they find it very difficult afterwards to learn it by 
rule and note; but when they get over the first three 
steps, the “one, two, three, and a hop,” all the difficulty 
is over. 
It is just the same in pruning. The man who has been 
accustomed to cut and prune after his owu natural 
fashion, or as if he came to this world for no other pur¬ 
pose, will find it a hard and tedious process to follow 
and imitate the first three steps of the scientific pruner, 
even though the said pruner is guided as much by cir¬ 
cumstances as by scientific rules; but no sooner does he 
master the first three fundamental rules for pruning 
than the difficulty is over. We must not suppose, how¬ 
ever, that the thing is either easy to learn, or that every 
one can be a thorough master of it; like every thing 
else, there will always be better pruners than others, 
teach or practice as we may. To be a good general 
pruner requires a long course of practice, because it is 
from that alone that wo can learn the vast variety there 
is in the nature of so many kind of plants and trees. 
A forester may prune his Oaks to perfection itself, and 
yet cut a sorry figure against a Peach wall; and a 
smock-frock customer, in Kent, may prune a filbert bush 
better than my lord’s gardener. So on to the end of the 
chapter. 
Here we have certain kinds of trees to fill up the 
boundary line of a confined garden for a screen, such as 
Poplars, Maples, Thorns, Oaks, Horse Chesnuts, Spruce 
and Silver Firs, S.cotch Pine, Larch, and such trees, and 
we must not allow them to spread out their limbs over 
our neighbour’s garden, or suffer them to trespass on 
our own more choice trees and shrubs in front of them 
along the border. We have thus a definite object to 
prune for, as much so as he who prunes for a crop of 
fruit; and if we take heed as to how we start, our trees 
are just as easily managed, and more so than the Peach 
or Apricot against the wall. All depends on the style 
of pruning for the first few years. I once cut-in a shoot 
of a Finns excelsa in the month of May, and it bled as 
fast as the drops could run, and the sap was as thin aud 
clear as spirits of turpentine. I never saw any tree 
bleed so fast before or since. I repeated the experiment 
two seasons after that, and at the same time, when the 
sap flowed as before. I never knew a Spruce or a Silver 
Fir to drop the sap after a cut at any season, but if they 
are pruned late in the spring, they, and the Larch, as well 
as many other conifers, will ooze out a kind of resin in the 
form of gum; therefore I should not like to make free 
with any of the tribe, by way of pruning, from the end of 
March till after Midsummer, and I would not hesitate 
to cut them at any other season, so that the whole of the 
boundary trees under consideration may be pruned any 
time in the winter; but from the middle of June to the 
middle of July is the best time in the whole year to 
prune all forest trees whatsoever ; the reason for that is, 
first, that none of them bleed at that season, the growth 
being then so rapid as to suck up all their sap faster 
than it comes, leaving none of it to run over; and 
secondly, that at that season growth is so vigorous, ex¬ 
tending the seat of life outwards, that new wood is soon 
formed over small wouaids, and round the sides of larger 
wounds; whereas, all wounds, or cuts, made from the 
end of October to the end of May, must necessarily 
stand fully exposed to all weathers till the Midsummer 
following. The worst of it is that few people can spare 
time for summer pruning. 
The Spruce, Silver Fir, and Larch, and most conifers, 
seldom require any pruning in a boundary line, or any¬ 
where in a garden, until they are old and full grown, and 
then all they require is to thin out the spray on the 
chief limbs, if the parts get too crowded, or, as is too 
often the case, if they were planted too close at first, and 
are now hurting each other, or some valuable shrubs 
near them, when the tops of the branches, which over¬ 
run the space between them and the shrubs, may be 
shortened back without any harm. So, too, if the Fir 
branches hang over the next door neighbour’s garden, 
for, be it remembered, I am now contemplating one of 
the evils of a house semi-detached ; builders will put up 
houses in pairs, and divide them aud the garden across 
the middle, and if you plant trees along the boundary of 
No. 1, they will spread their branches over No. 2, and 
so will those of No. 2 in the other directions; thus the 
occupiers turn colours, the one looks black and the 
other looks blue, and soon they are as much divided as 
the houses and gardens they severally occupy; there¬ 
fore, if only for the looks of the thing, it is surely worth 
while to learn to prune boundary trees before all other 
trees. 
According to my tale, almost all trees can be so pruned 
as to grow something in the way of trees trained against 
