THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY 
undertake to plant a new garden on the strength of old 
friendship, perhaps you will not make a better figure 
of it than I have done yet. 
Then there are beautiful vases in the experimental 
garden, which are of most artistic style and shapes. 
Some of them came out of the very moulds in which the 
last design for the Duchess of Sutherland was cast— 
these are called Duchesses, of course. How are they 
planted? That is another of the experiments which 
must stand over till we see how they look by-and-by ; 
for out of all the bedding Geraniums I have yet re¬ 
ceived, 1 only had one little plant of Tom Thumb sent 
among them. I had some excellent Petunias, but no 
Calceolarias; and as for Verbenas, I do not care much 
about them. There aro only six or seveu kinds of 
them worth planting out in a bed by themselves; but 
for mixed borders the Verbenas are the best in the 
world. You have only to make three sizes of them, 
and plaut the strongest size along the back of the border, 
and keep them to their own share of the border till the 
spaces between the plants, or, say, the whole bolder, is 
quite covered with them ; then, if you think a little 
mixture from the back kinds would improve those in 
the centre of the border, or next strongest kinds, you 
may allow a few of the runners to mix both ways. 
That is, let as many of the second strongest run into 
I the back ones as choose to grow that wuy; but allow 
I only a few of the strongest to advance into the centre, 
! and keep the lowest growers and the most delicate kinds 
in the front part of'the border, and never allow one 
from behind them to dispute possession with them. 
Unless these most simple rules are rigidly enforced, a 
border of mixed Verbenas will soon lose more than half 
the interest it should return to the owner. Delter to 
plant only a few of the strongest kinds of them, and 
allow them to push their claims as far and fast as they 
may, than to pretend to a good selection, and then allow 
the strong ones to cover and smother the rest. Therefore, 
although there are some good borders in the experi¬ 
mental garden that might be planted with mixed 
Verbenas, I did not think it prudent to make the attempt 
this seasou ; but I shall keep my eyes more open on the 
Verbenas this season for that very purpose. I shall 
note the habits and the tints which please me best; and 
I must have sweet-scented ones, be their habits or tints 
what they may. 
When J may be ablo to plant one of these borders 
with bedding Geraniums ou the Berlin wool shading 
style, if I do not take out a patent for the design, I shall 
print it. After the end of the second week in August I 
shall not take in any of the old kinds of bedding Gera¬ 
niums, or other bedding plants,—none but seedlings of 
the last year or two, and none of either, unless the 
carriage is full paid to my door, which may seem un- 
! reasonable to many; but 1 look upon the thing in a 
different light, and 1 know I shall receive a great deal 
more than I want; but that need not hinder anyone 
from sending any good kind he can spare, or he may 
wish to be noticed in comparison with others. I would 
not undertake, however, for any consideration, that part 
which many of my private friends suggested, and which 
is repeated by “ Zephyrus ” at page 150, about testing 
the merits of seedlings to be sold by the trade. The 
very idea of the notion is an apt illustration of the 
adage that one half the world do not know how the 
other half live ; but 1 shall prove seedlings to private 
breeders with pleasure, and tell them the exact value ot 
any seedling in the bed or in the market, 
j Some very strange incidents have come to my know¬ 
ledge already about this business. Nineteen hours after 
the publication of that number of The Cottage Gar¬ 
dener in which I said that the green-leaved crimson 
sport from the first Horse-shoe was lost, one of our best 
gardepers sent iqe a truss and a leaf of a crimson Gcru- 
GENTLEMAN’S COMPANION.— Juke 10,185G. 183 
uium more than 200 miles, simply asking, “Is not this 
the kind you thought was lost?” No, my dear Sir; but 
it is one which I believed to have been lost more com¬ 
pletely. It is a very old one, called Bentinchianum, of 
which there is not a variegated form from which we 
might expect a green sporting shoot to replace the 
original. Bentinchianum is fully as old as the Nosegay; 
and some one who wished, at that time, cross-breeding to 
be a monopoly, passed off this cross as a distinct species j 
from the Cape, as was done with the first of the 
Nosegays. 
In 1841, 45, and 40, I had an industrious agent at the 
Cape of Good Hope, who procured for me any and 
every thing I mentioned, and more besides. Among the 
latter was a plant of Pelargonium cucullatum , the very 
head of that section from which every one of the florist’s 
Pelargoniums, without exception, has come down to 
us. He, the said agent, sent word that a Mr. somebody 
out there suggested the probability of our getting into 
a new strain of perpetual blossoms for the garden 
through this very Cucullatum , which has the largest leaf 
of all the wild Pelargoniums so culled. I knew a few 
instances where relatives of Cucullatum were kept in old 
greenhouses, solely ou account of their disposition to 
flower during the winter ; but that did not induce me to 
look very favourably on straining Cucullatum for bed¬ 
ding, and I parted with the plaut at the earnest request 
of a valued friend, Mr. Whiting, of the Depedeuc 
Gardens, near Dorking. He said he wished for Cucul¬ 
latum above all others, but for what he did not say ; and 
if I recollect the story, the Eastern Counties Railway 
people mislaid the basket, or allowed some botanist to 
“ meet it bv moonlight alone.” However, I received 
twelve plants of a “large purple seedling” from a gar¬ 
dener, who says it covers a large space on the back wall 
of a greenhouse, where he has known it to bloom eleven 
mouths out of the twelve. This seedling, which is called 
after a titled lady, and was raised “ before he was born,” 
seems to me, in the absence of flowers, to be Cucullatum, 
or a very early cross from it, so that the very originals 
from which bedders and greenhouse kinds have sprung 
are not so far lost to us as many suppose ; and if so, we 
may yet retrieve the faults of the early breeders, and 
work out for ourselves new sections and new properties, 
which will be valuable in the flower garden at least. 
I should be glad to receive all the very old kinds of 
Geraniums in the country for this very purpose; also, 
any chance seedling which may be used for a particular 
purpose, although it may be useless in any other way; 
and l may mention Harkauay as one in point. This 
I received but the other day as “ a very striking edging 
plaut,” but of no other use, being a weak, straggling 
grower, and the individual flower is not worth looking 
at. Strange to say, one of my own seedlings opened 
this morning for the first time, and if I mistake not, it 
will put Harkauay on the shelf for ever; but should it 
turn out a strong grower, it will be of no use save as a 
breeder. 
The most pressing question at this momeut is, How 
do you manage your pots after planting out? I put up 
every size by itself us fast as the pots are emptied, get 
them thoroughly cleaned inside and out, keep all the 
cracked ones by themselves for temporary uses as long 
as they last, and put the rest by in piles of one size 
only, in stalls, as horses stand in the stable. It makes 
my hair stand on end to-see how some careless people 
let their pots go to rack and ruin after they once get 
them empty. D. Beaton. 
---, I 
Proverbial Savings. —Early in the third week ol 
April I said to a Worcestershire labourer, “1 have not I 
yet heard the cuckoo.” His answer was, “ No, Sir, it 
won’t i>e 'jepbuiy lair for four days to coiqe. You 
