November 20. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
113 
which comes up too strong. Then all the pruning will 
be from the end of June to the middle of September, 
and not only that, but I am convinced that in a few 
years we shall find out the whole of the Noisette Bour¬ 
bons and Hybrid Perpetuals—that is, all Roses which 
bloom in the autumn may be reduced to this kind of 
treatment, whether we have glass houses for them or 
not, and that winter-pruning will be confined to the 
June flowers only. Perhaps, too, we may find out that 
the strong Hybrid Chinas and Bourbons will do better, 
or, at least, as well as they do at present, if they are not 
pruned in winter. In that case we shall always gain 
ten days or a fortnight in May, as 1 found the case with 
the unpruned perpetuals last May. 
This week I have got an old garden memorandum- 
book, in manuscript, beginning with 1791, and carried 
on to 1830 by a great garden amateur; on one page is 
entered all the plants he bought, and from whom, and 
the prices; the other page is left blank for future memo¬ 
randa, among which 1 see as good and rational obser¬ 
vations on the cultivation of Roses, in and out of pots, 
forcing, &c., as is to be met with at the present day ; 
indeed, the very plan I adopted last year with the 
Hybrid Perpetuals was hinted at in 1799 in this book. 
The writer said it was of little help to cut down the 
strong stems which grew directly from the roots, mean¬ 
ing suckers; in two or three years they wearied them- 
i selves with flowering so much. After that he throws 
out a hint about allowing root-stems to form a new bush 
every year, and only cutting such as became weary of 
flowering; but whether he put this into practice or not, 
is not said. He took stock every third or fourth.year, 
that is, took down a list of all his plants at stated 
intervals, and the Colden-leaf Geranium is among them 
from 1793 to 1814, when he ceased to name his old 
kinds, and mentions his yearly purchases of them only. 
This Golden-leaf is our Golden Chain of the present day, 
and it seems to be the oldest seedling that is preserved 
from the Cape Scarlet, the oldest in cultivation of that 
breed, but now supposed to be lost; I had it at Shrub- 
land, however, this very season. When the Golden 
Chain makes a green shoot, as it sometimes did with 
me, I believe that to be identical with Inquinans alias 
Cape Scarlet. 
Now for our own times and our Roses. Ophirie is, 
[ perhaps, the nearest to a yellow of all the Noisettes 
j that are worth a place against the wall of a house, with 
| the exception of the Cloth of Gold] but a good yellow, 
free-blowing Noisette is still in expectation only. Mrs. 
Siddons is a better yellow than the last, but too dwarf 
for a wall, unless it were to fill up at the bottom; and 
Clara Wardel is much in the same way. All the 
Noisettes with red tints I care little about, as we have 
much better sorts of the same habit, and quite as hardy, 
in the strongest Bourbons, which, if not strong enough 
to run over a house, will do very well to be budded on 
I La Biche, or on Felicite Perpetuelle, for that purpose. 
To save room, I shall not in future repeat my lists as 
1 have done, but when they are finished I shall request, 
Mr. Editor, to repeat them all in alphabetical order, with 
names of classes, &c., for ready reference. 
Hardy Climbing Roses : Evergreens. —The best of 
all this class is unquestionably Felicite Perpetuelle, or 
Perpetue, as some call it, because every other free-grow¬ 
ing Rose will grow on it by budding. If I had a castle 
to cover round and round with all manner of Roses, 
I would guarantee that I could flower the Malmaison 
Rose on the highest pinnacle of it by means of this one 
climber, and the way I would go to work would be this : 
I would plant young plants of this climber at nine, ten, 
or twelve feet apart, according to the height of the 
building, and to guard against suckers. I would have 
the plants from strong cuttings made in October and 
November, and all the eyes picked out of them except 
the two top ones,—the cuttings being six inches long, 
there would be at least four inches of clear stem between 
the roots and the first branches, and that would be 
quite sufficient to keep down suckers from where they I 
are most apt to grow. Supposing the two eyes to grow, I 
1 would give them their own free will the first year, and j 
perhaps some manure water into the bargain, if the sum- j 
mer was dry. At the end of October I would cut them 
down to ten inches, leaving three or four buds on each 
for shoots to begin to bud on. I would bud the strongest 
sorts near the bottom, and would leave some shoots 
unbudded every season until the top was reached. On 
them, and near the top, I would bud the more dwarf sorts. 
In this way a whole collection of Perpetuals might easily 
be established, at little cost, on one kind of climber, or 
on half-a-dozen of them if it was preferred, such as I 
shall name presently; a shoot here and there of the 
climbers themselves would be left to make a greater 
variety of flower; and to guard against the bottom of the 
wall getting too bare after a few years, I woidd plant 
pillar Roses along the bottom, such as Gloire de Rosamene 
and the Tyrian Purple, &c. Princess Maria is the next 
best of the evergreen climbers, both for budding on and 
for tint, being the reddest of them; after that Myriantlies, 
tinged with pink; Princess Louise, also a little tinged 
with pink on a white ground; and Rampant, a fine 
delicate white Rose. All these bloom in immense 
clusters, but none of them require a wall, unless for the 
purpose of budding others on, unless it were a north 
wall which one wanted to cover fast. D. Beaton. 
GREENHOUSE AND WINDOW 
GARDENING. 
Charcoal, its uses for Plant Culture. —It is no 
easy matter now-a-days, to be the originator of a new 
principle. Discoveries and improvements in cultivation 
are generally the mere working-out of facts previously 
known, but not sufficiently generalised. The ascertain¬ 
ing of a fact is not so much the thing, as the being the 
first to make that fact bear upon practical utility. The 
comparatively uncultured genius, who delighted, himself 
with the wooden clock, tlie result of many an anxious 
whittling, was no less a genius, though clocks far supe¬ 
rior existed, which he had never seen, and knew not of. 
Hobbies most men like to ride, but it is rather disheart 
ening for them, when closely surveying a territory which 
they imagined they alone had discovered, to find the 
marks and foot-prints of others who preceded them. 
The man whose aim is to be practically useful, has no 
such misgivings. More than half-a-century ago, Arthur 
Young made many trials with charcoal-dust as a manuring 
agent, but with no very clear definite results. For a 
similar period, the dust and the soil through which the 
volatile parts of the wood passed during the process of 
charring, had been used successfully for improving the 
soil in many districts. Earlier stili, in great charcoal 
districts on the continent, the farmers found that though 
the site of the heaps was barren for a lesser or greater 
number of years, according as that soil was open and 
porous, or stiff and tenacious, partly owing to the roast¬ 
ing heat it had experienced, but chiefly to the super¬ 
abundance of potash with which the ground was satu¬ 
rated, yet afterwards, for a series of seasons, it was 
more than ordinarily fertile. For the using of charcoal 
as an agent for propagating purposes, within these ten 
years, we are chiefly indebted to Mr. Lucas, of Munich ; 
for its adaptation to cultivation in every circumstance, 
from the Banana to the Cabbage, we are principally in¬ 
debted to Mr. James Barnes, of Bicton. Whether that 
last-named eminent cultivator had known what is stated 
above as to charcoal-heap sites, is a matter of no im¬ 
portance. He did observe the luxuriant vegetation 
