THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
January 22. 
254 
BEDDING GERANIUMS. 
There is a white-flowered variety of Unique, a very 
strong grower, and the leaves not so soft or downy; but 
it flowers too sparingly for a beddor, and it seems to be 
quite barren. It is a good variety, however, to force in 
the spring for cut flowers, and the way to make the 
most of it is to keep it well cramped at the roots all the 
summer, and to have it in its flowering pot before the 
middle of July, and from that time to the end of Sep¬ 
tember to keep it stopped at every second joint it makes. 
It will stand tlio same degree of heat as Alba multijiora, 
but will not come into flower so soon. Every conceiv¬ 
able experiment ought to be tried witli this geranium, 
to see if it can be made to seed. Starvation at the 
roots, old age, and a sudden check or change of tem¬ 
perature at the moment the flowers are ripe for crossing, 
are the best-known rules for causing geraniums, that are 
shy to seed, to become breeders. The easiest way to 
accomplish all this is to use poor, light soil lor potting, 
to keep the plant or plants in the same pot for years, 
without any change of soil, to give them no stimulus, by 
extra heat or otherwise, through the whole winter and 
spring, and to endeavour to keep them back from bloom¬ 
ing to a later period than is natural to them, and when 
the flowers begin to open stop the shoot a joint beyond 
the truss, and set the plant in a cold draught, and give 
it very little water for a few days. I am quite confident 
that each of these steps will help a shy breeder to seed, 
also that old age helps the process. 
The cause of barrenness in geraniums is more myste¬ 
rious than that in any other family of plants that I have 
tried. I never met a single instance in the whole race 
in which the female organs were not quite perfect, as far 
as could be made out even by the help of magnifiers. 
The male organs, on the other hand, have all kinds of 
defects, from a barren anther to the want of any traces 
of their existence beyond a toothed ring where they 
ought to spring from. Their numbers, when they are 
developed, are as variable as the colour of the flowers. 
Another freak worthy of notice, and one which ought to 
save a promising seedling, is that for some years a seed¬ 
ling may be quite destitute of pollen, and yet turn 
round after a while and produce pollen in abundance. 
Witness Compactum, in which, at first, you could not 
meet with a pollen anther in a hundred flowers, but now 
it is as rare to find a barren anther. The same with 
'Torn Thumb. I recollect Mr. Ayres, who first brought 
Tom into notice, being quite fierce with some one who 
offered seeds of it for sale ; he said the thing was down¬ 
right imposition, that he had known it for so long a 
time, and that it produced no seeds at all. Meantime, 
however, Tom was getting up to the age of manhood, 
and thenceforward lias seeded as freely as any of them. 
Now, it is well worth while to keep this in mind, as 
when we get a seodling, however poor in colour, from a 
section that is hard to seed, we ought to keep it some 
years, although at first we might think it of no use 
because it had no pollen. The very distinct sections of 
geraniums will only cross—for some generations—with 
others belonging to the same section as themselves, and 
when any of these are ticklish to seed, a seedling like 
the above comes in very useful if it ever produces pollen. 
Hence it is that I would strongly recommend the Wldte 
Unique to be kept for the chance of yet getting it to 
seed, or even to yield pollen, because we are very short 
of kinfis in the section of Unique, and they have not yet 
crossed with any in the other sections. 
Moores Defiance is the only other sort that I know 
of which belongs to the true Unique, or Capitatum, 
section, and, like the white one, it is hitherto quite 
barren; it has dull scarlet flowers, runs a long way, 
but with us it does not make a good bed ; but I am told 
that in the Isle of Wight, they leave it out in the beds 
from year to year, with a slight covering in winter, and 
by that means it blooms beautifully every year, and is 
one of their best bedders thero. L have no doubt but 
the white one, under this treatment, would answer 
equally well. 
Here, then, ends the list of this section, Queen of 
Portugal, very scarce; Shrubiand Pet, much scarcer; 
Unique, purple and white; and Moores Defiance. It 
will save trouble in our correspondence, if our readers 
will bear in mind that no other geranium that wo know 
of will cross with any of these; but still that is no reason | 
why some one might not succeed better, and a hap¬ 
hazard experiment may prove how little the best of us | 
know on the subject, For walls or pillars, and for I 
pyramidal training in pots, the Unique section is well 
adapted, owing to their free growth and long-jointed 
stems; and we are much indebted to the young gentle¬ 
man who sent us word about the best way of rooting 
cuttings of them in summer. 
Lady Mary Fox is the best and the last of its 
race. 1 am not sure that we have another belong¬ 
ing to the same section, but I have known a good 
many of them. Reniforme and Sapefiorum were the 
wild parents from whence this favourite race first 
sprang. The third or fourth generation in this line 
produced one called Ignescens, which was a great 
favourite thirty years ago. After that came Ignescens 
major, a still greater favourite followed by Fire King, 
which brought them to the borders of the Unique 
section. If these old geraniums are now lost, as I ex¬ 
pect they are, we have no means left us to extend the 
race of Lady Mary Fox, for I am quite certain it will 
never cross with any other geranium out of its own 
strain. No one can take more pains with it, or try more 
varied experiments with it than 1 have done, and as I 
am constantly asked how to improve or go to work with 
such and such bedders, I mean to put the whole on the 
best footing I can before I have done with them. 1 
know very well, however, how Lady Mary Fox, or the 
breed to which it belongs, may be improved to a 
certainty, and that is to begin at the beginning again, 
and to keep every plant that seeds in every cross or 
generation, until you push the race to the exact stage at 
which we now see it represented in Lady Mary Fox, 
that is, to a dead lock. Then turn back, and see which 
are the best of your reserved seedlings which proved fer¬ 
tile, and then cross them round in a circle under very 
high cultivation. This is exactly the route by which 
the florists have brought up their Pelargoniums to be 
the wonder of the age, and yet many of them deny the i 
inference when they say that breeding in-and-in spoils 
their stock, when the truth is that nothing else but 
breeding in-and-in has been going on among them for 
the last twenty years. The offspring of three wildings 
only are the only materials that have been worked on 
with during that timo. However the tints have been 
varied, the blood has not been altered since Garth and 
Poster, the fathers of the large geraniums, took the reins 
from the hands of Dennis and Weltje, the last of the 
old race of breeders. Breeding in-and-in went on pros¬ 
perously for a dozen or fifteen years, but, like our bed¬ 
ders, it has come to a stand still affair at last. I have 
seen every new seedling, as it appeared in London for 
the last twenty years, and were it not that the “ fancy” 
ones had been made use of, and have given some fine 
variations to the race, I can safely assert that there was 
not a single improvement as to race, in all the seedlings 
which were exhibited for the last ten years, although a 
wonderful improvement was going on all the time 
according to the views of the florist’s fancy. Circularity 
and substance of petal kept the game alive all that time, ; 
but at last the “ Little Fancies ” made a grand improve¬ 
ment in the hands of Mr. Hoyle. Ajax and Ocellata 
leading the w r ay. Their i>oints ought not to be lost, nor i 
