THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
1 89 
June 26.J 
merely as an opinion; it will serve to set some of our 
reader’s craniums at work ; and we doubt not that many 
of them have the hump of vegetable physiology more 
fully developed than we of the blue apron and crooked 
knife. 
AmucoTS.—Where strong and young trees aro produc¬ 
ing very robust shoots, these should ho stopped before 
June is out, if possible, in order to cause them to pro¬ 
duce moderate side branches, and to bring forward the 
inferior portions of the trees. Care should be taken to 
keep down all foreright shoots produced from snags, or 
gross shoots pruned hack ; such waste spray suffered to 
smother the true blossom spurs in embryo, are, doubt¬ 
less, one of the chief causes of abortive blossoms in the 
Apricot. The finger and thumb, therefore, must be kept 
going all through June and July, after which there is 
much less tendency than in the peach to produce late 
spray. Above all, let not the caterpillar pursue bis 
ravages unmolested. It is astonishing what trouble and 
loss may be prevented this way, by picking carefully 
the patches of eggs of the red-bar moth in the pruning 
season ; from these little paste-like patches, those larva) 
are hatched, which very frequently commit such fearful 
havoc amongst the foliage. R. Errington. 
THE FLOWER-GARDEN. 
Companion to the Calendar for July. —This is the 
least busy month of the whole summer in the flower- 
garden, and the principal operations requiring imme¬ 
diate attention tell their own tale on the spot, without 
the aid or forethought of the remembrancer; every plant 
that requires a stake, or to be tied up, or trained on the 
ground, is seen as we walk along; and every bed or 
plant which needs the assistance of strong water may 
as easily be noticed. It may be useful, however, to say 
that July is the very best time in the whole year to give 
liquid manure to every thing we want to strengthen or 
push on, as now things are in the height of their sum¬ 
mer growth, and they can be more froely dealt with on 
that account. 
Boses, particularly, are now’in need of a strengthening 
supply, after the June flush of their beauties is over ; no 
plant stands more in want of, or is more improved by, 
hand-feeding, than the rose; indeed, the great growers 
of them put far more stress on their summer feeding, 
than on the kind of soil or winter dressing most suited 
for them. I am almost sure that many people are quite 
wrong in pruning their very strongest roses in the 
spring too much, particularly strong climbing roses, and 
those called hybrid Chinas ; if such need much pruning, 
and they almost always do in good soil, I cannot help 
thinking that July is the best time to prune them. I 
have done so myself, for many years, with the best 
effect. It is not so easy, however, to break new ground 
on paper, as to try experiments in the garden; but 
having established a monthly paper in aid of the Calen¬ 
dar, it seems to me that I should not pass over any 
■ practices, new or old, because it is not fashionable to 
write about them, and to explain the reasons on which 
they are founded as well as I can. It is now just twenty- 
! three years since I saw the best gardener that ever Scot¬ 
land produced, the late Mr. M'Nab, of the Botanic, at 
Edinburgh, pruning his strong roses in July, something 
in the way that others do in the spring; full two-thirds 
of every strong shoot on a bush was cut off, just after 
flowering—that is, unless it was wanting to keep up the 
roundness of the bush, or, if against a wall or fence, the 
shoot was necessary to fill up the space; all other 
shoots were dealt with as I say, and very small ones 
were cut nearly to the bottom, and some were cut off 
; altogether. Then, by the end of August, when a strong 
| shoot from any of those cut parts should head above 
the rest, and promised to become straggling, it was 
topped or stopped down to the general height, and so 
the whole remained all the winter, and till very late in 
the spring—I mean all very strong roses—when the 
mere tips were only removed, and in some cases not even 
that; nothing could have answered better. A general 
cutting or pruning of roses in July need not at all to be 
considered an irregular or a novel practice; hundreds 
pursue it every year all over the kingdom; the only 
novelty is in recommending it as part of the routine 
practice in the rosary. At any time during the summer, 
the gardener, or amateur, who is particular about “ a 
fine head ” of standard roses, will not hesitate one mo¬ 
ment to cut in any one shoot which may grow out much 
beyond the outline of the others; and when you ask the 
reason, it is ten to one if you are not told that it is done 
for the look of the thing; they cannot bear to see the 
symmetry of their rose heads deranged by strong growth; 
but depend on it, if the practice thus indulged in, year 
after year, “ for the look of the thing,” was against a 
fundamental law of rose growth, the “ look,” in the long 
run, would be something else besides symmetry. 
Cuttings. —Towards the end of the month we begin to 
put in cuttings of all the scarce sorts of bedding gera¬ 
niums, if only a few of each sort, and so continue on 
with them to the end of September. As soon as a few 
cuttings can be spared, they are taken off, and to get on 
a very scarce kind as fast as possible we put it under a 
hand-glass, which we shade at first in the middle of the 
day, as all our geranium cuttings are planted on a sunny 
border; then towards the middle of September, the 
plants from those early cuttings are potted singly in 
small pots, and are rather better nursed through the 
winter than those of which we possess a full stock; 
early next spring their tops are made into cuttings, the 
bottoms forced in heat, to make more cuttings, and be¬ 
fore the end of April there are as many plants as will 
fill a bed of moderate size, unless the new or scarce 
kind is a very slow grower indeed, such as the Golden 
Chain is in most places. With the exception of gera¬ 
niums, we put all cuttings of the flower-garden plants 
under a north wall, in July, and when a nice border is 
made up purposely for such things, almost every thing 
may be had from cuttings in July, if we begin in good 
time. I recollect, many years ago, having had a large 
collection of very fine Dahlias, which were planted out 
in large pieces, about the middle of April, and by this 
time they had made so many shoots from the bottom, 
that we had to pull out as many as seven or eight stalks 
from some of the roots, and wheel them out of the gar¬ 
den as so much useless weeds. A baker who was 
passing at the time, asked permission to take away some 
of them; he had as many as he could carry, and, I believe, 
he rooted every one of them, at any rate he had a large 
bed of Dahlias in the autumn from that lot of cuttings, 
although he had nothing better to get them on than the 
open air. 
Chrysanthemums. —When they begin to grow away 
freely in the open ground is the right time to draw 
some of the longest shoots to one side, preparatory to 
laying in the points by-and-by, for making very dwarf 
plants, which often come in useful after the first October 
frosts are over, to keep up the show as late as possible, 
after most of the more tender things are done with. 
Layering. —This is the principal month for layering 
all soft-wooded things, that do not come so readily from 
cuttings; and to those who do not understand howto 
make layers properly, we must say that layering is a 
half-way method of making cuttings, so as to get them 
to root before more than one-half of the shoot is sepa¬ 
rated from the parent plant: In making cuttings, we 
cut just under a joint, for two reasons, first, because 
fresh roots come easier from where a joint is, and, se¬ 
condly, the knot at the joint is harder than the part 
