THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN’S COMPANION.— July 32, 1856. 
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to Lear upon those associates straitened in pecuniary 
means. Can we, with consistency, throw open that relief 
to them only after they have sunk deeper in want and 
distress? Pass a resolution condemnatory of the whole 
system of canvassing, and you will hear of few com¬ 
plaints, for at the bottom of most of them lies this wasted, 
lost money; and you will take from defeat and disap¬ 
pointment this most virulent sting, just because you 
have resolved that the candidates for your favour, if un¬ 
successful, shall be made no poorer in a pecuniary point 
of view. If there was the slightest difficulty, it would 
easily he met by the committee giving a more detailed 
account of the circumstances of the respective candidates 
in the usual polling-paper. This last objection I look 
upon as the most important. Will friends and members 
say at once, it shall be seriously and carefully considered? 
• R. Fish. 
ROSE CUTTINGS.—CUTTINGS GENERALLY.— 
COCOA-NUT FIBRE REFUSE FOR MULCHING. 
What is the best time to put in Rose cuttings? Mr. 
Errington put in lots of them last summer, about the 
end of June, and gave them the benefit of a mild bottom- 
beat in a spent hotbed ; and I know an old grower of 
Pinks and Clove Carnations, who strikes all his pipings 
of both in a similar spent hotbed, and has done so for 
more than thirty years, without any variation as to time 
or superintendence. He puts them in about the end of 
June, and his pipings are never more than just one iuch 
long—merely the last joint at the top; and the grass he 
cuts back to as much as will make his one-ineb cuttings. 
His compost is very rich and very sandy, and ho screens 
it through such a fine sieve that, it feels to the touch like 
so much flour from the mill. Neither he nor any one 
else can tell what his compost really is, for he keeps up 
the “ old rubbish-lieap.” with as much care as he does 
his Onion-beds; everything dead or alive, good, bad, 
and indifferent, goes to the rubbish-heap for twelve 
months, and for two years after that it is turned over 
and over as often as he can spare a careful hand for the 
job, and till you would think the whole was one mass of 
fine powdery stuff. There is not a cutting he makes but 
is rooted in that compost; and he sifts it very fine for 
the softer cuttings, and adds a great deal of sand to it. 
He too says, that from the end of Juno to the middle of 
August is the best time to put in Rose cuttings of all 
sorts, and that most of the old class of summer Roses 
will root at that time if put into his universal compost, 
well sifted ; then to open trenches across a south border, 
as if for Peas ; fill the trenches with that compost, stamp 
it down firmly by walking over it, and it is fit for- 
putting in the Rose cuttings, which are also made very 
short—not more than three inches, and some not half 
that—and all of them, if possible, with a heel or a 
burr from the union with the last year's wood. Fie 
presses the soil about them so hard that one might think 
the wet would never get down there; and if the time is 
dry, or very hot, he shades a good deal with boughs 
stuck into the ground just like staking for Peas, and 
about a yard high. He despises all books on gardening, 
and all writers of books he puts down as so many cox¬ 
combs; yet he is as successful in most branches of the 
art as the best of us, but sends nothing to the shows, 
because he believes gardening “ has been brought down 
to that pitch by all this writing, that there is not a man 
in the country fit to be a judge of really good things!” 
Sometimes he says that such and such cuttings will 
do any day in the year; but I never could get him to 
say that Rose cuttings would do better than in July : 
and I recollect, some years back, when Mr. Cole, now 
nurseryman near Birmingham, came to me at Shrub- 
land Park, he enjoyed a good reputation as a Rose 
j grower, and that was the very first trial of strength I 
imposed on him; but he put off the thing till the end 
: of June, and then struck off about 800 Rose cuttings in 
six weeks, in a two-light box, over a gentle hotbed, and 
with a couple of inches of silver sand all over the bed, 
as if for a cutting-pot; then well watered the sand, 
pressed it down, and put in his cuttings as thickly as 
possible, some with and some without leaves; but they 
were all easy sorts to root, and were intended chiefly for 
stocks to work others on. 
Now, against all this, allow me to give the result of 
our last move in the Rose line in the Experimental 
Garden. I cannot say if we were the earliest in the 
country with them, or the very latest. Every one of 
the cuttings was made and put in during the week be¬ 
tween Christmas and the new year ; and 1 think the last 
few rows were put in the first days of the new year. On 
a rough guess, there are from twelve hundred to a thou¬ 
sand and a half, and not more than a score have failed 
to root out of the whole; and just now the cutting-bed j 
is as full of Roses as a patch of them in a nursery- 
garden. The sorts are all the best sorts of the last ten 
or fifteen years. I never saw a better hit with so many 
kinds ; but there they are, and the old despiser of book 
learning may see them by a personal application to the 
writer; and the next time I can get him into the humour 
of talking about gardening I shall be able to prove to 
him, as clearly as anything can be proved, that every 
day from the middle of June to the last of December is 
“ the best time” to put in Rose cuttings in the open 
ground. 
But I would go a good length with the old heretic in 
his prejudice about so many leaves to a cutting. He 
hardly allows a whole leaf to any cutting, and very few 
“ docked ” ones. I believe, however, that our success 
depended in a great degree on a new kind of mulching 
material, on which we have been experimenting since lust 
October. This material is the refuse of the cocoa-nut 
(Cocos nucifera ) after the fibre is extracted, which fibre 
is now known all over the country as making the best 
mats for doors, passages, halls, and other places where 
foot-mats are used. The manufacture of this fibre from 
the cocoa-nut is carried on here at Kingston, and an 
immense accumulation of the refuse is on sale at a low 
figure. We get a one-horse cart-load of it for one shil¬ 
ling; and it is the very best material for mulching all sorts 
of plants, from newly-planted hedges to that of Rose 
cuttings, that I ever heard of. Last winter we used 
it round the cold pits and frames; round every tree 
and hush and cutting we planted in the open air. 
We use it to plunge pots in this summer, and I am 
perfectly certain that it wants only to be made known ! 
to be in request for similar purposes in all situations 
where it can be had as cheap as tan; or even were it 
double the price of tan by long carriage, 1 am satisfied 1 
that a gardener who once gets a relish of it would never ] 
want to be without some of it by him in the framing- 
ground. It seems to be free from all tannin and caustic ; 
juices, for no plant that I have yet tried seems to 
dislike it, but will root out into it as into leaf-mould. 
When it is once wet, it seems never to dry right through. 
All the dry weather wc had this spring and summer 
only rendered the surface a little powdery. There is 
not more than one inch thick of it over the Ro^e-cutting 
bed; but the surface of that bed has been as moist all 
along, up to this day, as it was when we put in the 
cuttings last Christmas. For filling in alleys in the 
kitchen-garden it makes a cleaner walk than the 
best gravel; and when it is quite rotten, 1 believe 
it would mako the best “ leaf-mould.” A gardener who 
buried lots of it three feet deep to fill up inequali¬ 
ties in a new garden some six years since, trenched 
up part of it this spring, aud told me it was as black as 
peat and as “fat as fresh butter;” but I did not see 
