60 THE COTTAGE GARDENER. October 30. 
within about half-an-inch of their base ; which gives the 
spring-blossom plenty of room for growth, and at the 
same time leaves an eye or two of wood-buds, which in a 
few weeks produce the same character of spray as their 
progenitor; thus a permanent provision is made for 
the stability and long endurance of the spurs. Thus we 
see the first object with the young bush is, by pruning, 
selection, and careful training, to procure and establish 
a lot of lenders at proper distances, and thenceforward to 
carry them up as nearly perpendicular as possible, and 
by shortening, to compel them to furnish the whole stem 
with spurs, cutting annually back the watery side-spray 
just alluded to. Robert Errington. 
THE ELOWER-GARDEN. 
About this time last year I made up my mind for an 
experiment on Perpetual Roses upon a large scale. It was 
founded on an old practice which I had often witnessed of 
training-down Moss Roses upon moss, a layer of this 
being placed all over the surface of the bed by way of 
mulching late in the spring. The Moss Roses did beauti¬ 
fully this way ; the shoots were spread flat on the moss, 
and the side-shocts from them flowered at different heights 
from the moss according to their lengths, but the longest 
of them was much shorter than those from bushes not 
trained at all; and it is always so with bushes, or even 
trees, when their branches are trained down, or sideways, 
in a horizontal position. Now w r hen we train a Pear- 
tree that way, we get flowers and fruit from short spurs 
along the main branches; but if the tree is at all vigor¬ 
ous a great number of fresh shoots will grow from the 
spurs, which we call breast-wood ; and we all know how 
jealous Mr. Errington is about the use and abuse of 
his breast-wood. He never allows breast-wood at all; 
he nips off the points as fast as they get to a certain 
length, generally. Applying tins principle to the trained 
shoots of the Moss Roses, those who treated them this 
way soon found themselves in a difficulty, and many 
experiments were tried to get over this difficulty : some 
tried to prune these Moss Roses as if they were Black 
Currants or Red Currants, Peach-trees, and all the other 
trees and bushes that used to be regularly pruned at 
that time ; but all would not do ; the Roses would not 
blow well the second year, and the third year they did 
worse; all the trained shoots turned as dry and old- 
looking as if they had been made many years before, 
and a profusion of suckers, like shoots, would spring up 
from the collar of the plants, or from the bottom of the 
main shoots where they had been bent down for train¬ 
ing, and the upshot of the system was, that it condemned 
itself; no one could do any good with it after the first 
season, and many of us gardeners thought it died a 
natural death, like many more fanciful things which we 
tried from time to time and failed in. The Cottage 
Gardener had not been long in circulation, however, 
before inquiries began to drop in about the system of 
training-down Roses, and since I was turned over to 
the flower-garden department I set my face resolutely 
against the plan. I had always some cold water by me 
to cool the ardour of those who wanted to train down their 
Roses, whether upon moss or on the bare surface of the 
beds, and if I had put any value on being thought a 
consistent writer T must have gone on in my opposition 
to this way of growing Roses to the end of the chapter; 
but they say that consistency is only another name for 
obstinacy; at any rate, I began to think a good deal 
about the old way of training Roses. I recollected 
having heard some gardeners maintain that the plan 
was good and easy to be carried out, but then, from 
what I had seen myself, and had hoard others as reso¬ 
lutely condemn, I put all this down on the side of 
consistency; but no matter how strong any of us hold 
an opinion, on whatever subject it may be, as soon as it 
is called in question by our own doubts about it, or by 
the surmises of other people, we begin to lose faith in it 
immediately, whether we choose to own it or not; but to 
own a fault, or a mistake, is by far the best way in the 
long run, and my experiment on the Roses—part of 
which I have told about already—has clearly proved 
that I was in the wrong; that all w r ere wrong who 
doubted the good effects of training-down Roses; and 
not only that, but this experiment brought out a new 
fact, of which I am now as confident as I am of writing 
this letter. 
The fact is, that none of the autumnal or Hybrid 
Perpetual Roses should be pruned at all, according 
to our ideas of pruning. We never apply the term | 
pruning to our way of dressing Raspberry-bushes every 
year; we merely select so many of the strongest canes 
on a stool to fruit next year, and all the little ones, with • 
the canes which bore the last crop, w'e cut clean out j 
from the bottom; and if that is pinning, why, to lop off 
a bough which hangs over the road must be pruning 
also. Now these Perpetual Roses do better thus treated, 
like so many Raspberry plants, than by any other way 
hitherto in use, and equally so whether the shoots be 
trained down or horizontally, or merely left just in the 
way they took to grow last summer. I brought down 
the issue of this experiment already to the end of the 
first crop of bloom last June, and I then said that I 
would cut out the branches of some that had done 
flowering to see if that would do as well, or better, than 
letting them remain to the end of the season. Four 
plants of Madame Laffay, the best known representa¬ 
tive of the Hybrid Perpetuals, and two of the Crimson 
Perpetuals, or Rose du Roi, as that of the Perpetual 
Damask Roses, w r ere thus experimented on as they were 
going out of flower, and before the second growth began. 
They were not cut very close, but to this day they show 
that they were cut at the wrong time; in short, they 
ought not to have been pruned till the end of August, 
or sometime later, when the second growth was nearly 
finished, or better still, they might have been left to the 
end of October, and then, instead of pruning the side 
branches, all the last year’s wood should be cut out, and 
this summer’s growth laid in at full length. The easiest 
way for a beginner to mind this way of managing Per¬ 
petual Roses is to compare them to so many Raspberry- 
bushes, and to cut them exactly like them. The wood 
of one year is to be left at full length that winter, and 
at the next dressing time, after that wood is fruited, in 
the case of the Raspberry, and flowered in that of the 
Rose, it is to be cut clean away down to where the strong 
shoots for another season w'ere grown from. The simi¬ 
larity of the treatment for the Raspberry and the Per¬ 
petual Rose goes still closer. When the Raspberry 
canes are selected and tied to a stake, or placed in any 
other way, it is customary to cut off the very points of 
them, more for the look of the thing than for any 
good it does for the next crop. The same is done, and 
must be done, in most cases, with the Perpetual Rose. 
Let us take Madame Laffay, for instance, and say that 
a good plant of it was trained in some way or other last 
winter, the shoots laid in at their full length, or nearly 
so; that these shoots made small side-shoots along their 
whole length last May, and that these small shoots 
flowered most profusely last June and to the middle of 
July; the young, second, or Midsummer shoots, which 
arose from the bottom of the trained ones, are now from 
eighteen inches to four feet or more in length, and in 
bloom at the top. By the time the bloom is over for 
this year, the old shoots that were trained down last 
winter are ready to be cut out altogether, and the young 
ones just going out of bloom, are ready and fit to be 
laid down, or sideways, in their stead, and the very tops 
which bore the flowers, but the other must be dressed a 
