March 4. 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
853 
time, I would most strongly advise parties not to think 
of sending out tre6s in the spring. My friends in Inver¬ 
ness would not thank me to send them down the best 
fruit-tree in London late in the spring, because it would 
suffer so much from drying, and from the check, just at 
the moment the tree was beginning to grow. 
From September to Christmas is the right time to 
take up and pack trees for Australia, New Zealand, Port 
Natal, the north of India and China, and the earlier the 
better. Another great point in the management of this 
business, is to have all those trees, &c., intended for the 
journey, pruned very close about the middle of Septem¬ 
ber, or before that month is out, and not to lift them 
for a few weeks after pruning; and the reason for this 
is, that during that time the roots will gather a large 
store of sap, and the tree being pruned, this large store 
must be held in a small compass, so that the roots, stem, 
and branches are ready to burst with it in a few weeks; 
and if it were earlier in the season, they would undoubt¬ 
edly burst into new wood and leaves as they do in the 
spring, all through the force of accumulated sap; and 
we need no prophet to foretell us that a full-sapped tree 
will be more able to stand a long voyage than one that 
is half spunged of its sap by careless management, or 
rather let us say, an oversight—such as “ forgetting all 
about it ” until three days before the vessel is ready to 
start, then flying away to the first nursery, and picking up 
something, tearing it out of the ground almost by main 
force, cutting off all the branches, and the last joint of 
the little finger to boot, then off again for the doctor to 
save your life, and before he comes you forget all about 
Beaton and the wet moss, balls and all, and some one 
else must finish for you, “ puddle the roots,” and get the 
rest of the packing done just “ as it used to be; ” and 
when the box gets to port you will hear by the next post 
that it was a post too late; but you cannot give it a 
thought, your finger is so bad. Yes, but not half so bad 
as sending off trees to New Zealand in the spring; 
besides, before next September, the New Line of Mail 
Steamers will have found out the shortest cut to Sydney, 
and they will carry all sorts of plants and seeds both 
ways much better, and in half the usual time now occu¬ 
pied in the journey; and as cargoes are charged more 
by the bulk than by weight, the best packer will pay 
the least for his consignment. 
To bring this mode of packing home to the general 
reader, I must mention a second application of it by a 
particular friend of mine, a Suffolk gardener, who was 
aware of all the details of my experiment with the wet 
balls of moss. He is the party who first found out the 
value of the carpenter’s shavings for packing with. Like 
many more of our readers, he had neither pit nor green¬ 
house to keep his Geraniums, nor wax cloth from Cal¬ 
cutta to wrap round the moss and roots, but still he 
kept to the principle of the wet moss system, and by it 
he saved a good number of common plants; I cannot 
say how many, but he did not lose a single plant that 
winter. As soon as the borders were cleared in October, 
he took such as he wished to save, and put them in the 
wet balls of moss, exactly as I stated last week, and 
some smaller ones, he put as many as six or eight in 
one ball; he did not squeeze any of the water from 
the moss, but left the balls to drain for several days, 
and then he put them up in several folds of an old 
newspaper, and tied the paper as tight as he could 
round the stems of the plant, a little above the moss, 
with the intention of keeping them in his cottage as I 
had done, and also to see whether or not the damp 
from the moss would come out through the paper in 
the course of a week or two. I cannot say just now 
whether the damp affected the paper to the outside or 
not; if it did, it is very likely he added some more 
folds of it; at any rate, he saved his geraniums. He 
moved them from place to place, in order to give them 
the benefit of a fine day outside, and to save them from 
the frost at night. One very hard frosty night, he 
thought his bed-room would be the safest place for | 
them; and, to be more out of the way in the morning, ; 
he put them one by one within the valance of the bed, 
and, in doing so, he met with a sad accident, for which 
he had to listen patiently to a good Caudle lecture on 
this new process of packing plants for long voyages; 
but the upshot of the thing turned up a trump at last. 
He thought he must be more tidy for the future, and so 
he procured two or three shallow boxes to put them 
into, and the first packing stuff which came to hand 
were the shavings from his friend the carpenter; these 
he arranged, according to his own version of the story, 
“ exactly as they pack the hampers with plants from 
London.” A rather indefinite mode of explanation for 
The Cottage Gardener, it is true, as they of London 
pack in all sorts of ways, but the meaning is this:— 
A quantity of the shavings are first packed close in the 
bottom of the box, filling it up so high, that when the 
enveloped bales are placed on it, the plants standing in 
an upright position, the tops of them are well up above 
the rim of the box; then, beginning at one end, you 
place one of the balls in the corner, after that a lew 
shavings, to keep the next ball from touching the first 
one, then a second ball, and a second lot of shavings, and 
so on alternately until the box is quite full, the tops of 
the balls being all on a level, and a trifle below the 
rim of the box, which brings the whole very near the 
way they pack pots with plants in flat hampers in the 
nurseries; so that, instead of carrying about a lot of 
separate parcels or plants for airing, &c., a whole boxful 
of them is now ready at your hand, and so light, too, 
that a child could place one of them outside the window, 
full in the sun. My friend is not endowed with a good 
share of patience when he has a new experiment on the 
wing, and before the turn of the new year he must 
needs poke his fingers into these boxes, take out a ball 
here and there, and examine it. I am not sure whether 
he did not weigh some of them in the scales, to see if 
the moss parted with any of the moisture; the truth is, 
we shall never hear of the whole process; the substance 
of that- lecture is ever present to his mind, and he 
now turns the conversation whenever the experiment 
is alluded to. One thing he owns, however, he did 
give the balls one watering in February from the spout 
of an old tea-pot, pouring a little at a time on the stem 
or stems of the plants; but whether that did more harm 
than good we shall probably never hear; it must be 
sufficient for us, who have “neither pit nor greenhouse,” 
to know, that every plant under the experiment, lived 
out the winter, that the whole were unfolded, at the 
end of March, as carefully as we should a mummy; 
the condition of the roots at this stage we have not 
learnt, but the plants were put in by the heels close by 
a south wall, and were protected from the frost to the 
middle of May, when they were removed to the flower- 
borders ; this last part of the plan I recommended at 
the taking-up time in October, but I fear not very 
clearly, for some one has written to ask if I meant dried 
geraniums to be planted out in the flower-garden at the 
end of March. 
Now, if I had a lot of common plants that I did 
not care much about, busy as I am, I would try this 
experiment over one whole summer, for the curiosity 
of the thing. I would not adopt the paper covering, 
like my friend the Suffolk man, but take some per¬ 
fectly waterproof and air-proof covering, — a bladder 
would not be a bad thing, or a thin sheet of Gutta 
Percha, and they now make it as thin almost as the 
paper of this page, but a piece of very thin oil-clotli 
or waxed cloth would do. I would ball up the roots in 
wet moss, so wet, indeed, that it could not hold 
another drop, and after fastening the edges of the 
