July 17.] 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER 
239 
in a permanent way, amove severe operation is requisite 
than can, with prudence, be advised at this time. 
R. Errington. 
THE FLOWER-GARDEN. 
Roses. —Of all the roses which I left unpruned last 
winter, and which turned out so well, I think Barron 
Prevost, Mrs. Elliot, the Duchess of Sutherland, and Ful- 
gore are the best. No one could make out any difference 
in most of the flowers of Fulgore, before they were quite 
expanded, from those of the old Cabbage-rose, and they 
were fully as sweet. It is an old variety of the new 
breed of hybrid perpetuals ; the habit of it is very bad 
indeed, and it does worse on the dog-rose than on its 
own roots. It always makes one or two good shoots at 
the expense of all the rest; and sometimes, when you 
prune it close, it either dies outright, or gets so irregular 
in the head that no one can bear to see it. Like the 
I Oloire de Rosamene it does best on its own roots ; and, 
I with all its faults of habit, no one who lias ever admired 
the old cabbage-rose—the best of them all—should be 
without it. In October, and as long as the frost will 
allow it, you may cut abundance of roses as good and as 
sweet from Fulgore as any one can get in June. It is 
also the only rose I know of that will grow well for 
more than a few years on the Ayrshire roses, such as 
Ruga. I have had it now eight years on three climbers 
of the Ayrshire breed, and doing as well as I could 
desire; and I am strongly of opinion that it should not 
be worked on the dog-rose at all; and I am also of 
opinion, that having had the same attention as to 
summer-pruning as the climbers on which it is budded 
has had some influence on it, and caused it to do better 
than if it had been treated in the usual way of dwarf 
roses. At any rate, one thing is quite certain, which is, 
I that this, the sweetest and the latest-flowering of our 
perpetual bloomers, will bud and do well on a class of 
popular climbing roses, on which no other rose will live 
more than a few years. Barron Prevost is certainly the 
most splendid rose, and the largest we have of all the 
perpetuals ; under the plan of not pruning it in winter, 
the size of the flowers, with me, was immense. Comte 
de Montalivet has a larger and wider face than the 
Barron, but then it is only a very thin rose, semi-double 
as it is termed, and is best to be looked at from a little 
distance ; it will not bear a close inspection. Neverthe¬ 
less, from its enormous size, and having a tint which is 
rare in roses, it should be grown in quantities, as we do 
the Gloire de Rosamene. It is the only rose I know 
which hides its only fault, that is, its want of double¬ 
ness : instead of opening a full face like Oloire de Rosa¬ 
mene, and showing the “ evil eye,” the petals actually 
fold inwards towards the eye, and hide it completely; 
and you might suppose, at a little distance from it, 
that you saw the largest and the most double rose in 
England, when, if this Comte opened back like other- 
roses, it would look as much like a half-double holly¬ 
hock as anything else I can think of. Mrs. Elliot 
should certainly never be close pruned. It made shoots 
more than four feet long with me last year, the very top 
buds of which produced the finest sample of the variety 
I ever saw. This, and William Jesse, looked as if they 
were varnished with that rich metallic lustre which they 
alone, of all the roses, exhibit in the most perfect degree. 
La Reine never does well on our light soil; and on the 
no-pruning system it was worse than before. Prince 
Albert, with "Earl Talbot, and two or three other line 
roses which require a very favourable season to open 
them finely with us here, did not answer better by not 
being pruned. Therefore, I am led to this conclusion, 
with respect to the experiment—as far as it has gone— 
that it does not help natural defects in a rose, unless, 
indeed, it may turn out this autumn that the shy 
openers may unfold themselves more freely under the 
next stage of the experiment, which I last week pro¬ 
mised to allude to; but before I do so, and whilst I 
think of it, I must tell how I managed to make a hedge 
of perpetual roses without laying down a regular foun¬ 
dation for one. 
Ever since our hedges of the Gloire de Rosamene 
began to draw the attention of visitors to that style of 
exhibiting them in pleasure-grounds, my worthy em¬ 
ployers were desirous that others, including the Moss 
and old Cabbage roses, should be tried in hedges also; 
and I am not very sure that this earnest request was 
not at the bottom of my experiment of not pruning in 
winter : at all events, it has ended in part of the trial. 
Four years since I planted one or two specimens of all 
our best roses in a row, from the door of my cottage 
down in front of a peach-border, and only eighteen 
inches from the side of the walk. They were all budded 
on six-inch stocks of the Boursault, the best stock for 
our light land, were it not the bother it gives one to 
keep down suckers. These were intended to “ kill two 
birds with one stone : ” first, for cut flowers; and, when 
they got too large and encroached on the walk, to be 
potted for forcing, or to be sent to the “rosary,” full- 
grown, and still in the prime of youth. Well, as soou 
as the experiment of letting a great number of roses 
go unpruned was determined on, this row in front 
of my house was fixed on to make a hedge of at 
once, and such a hedge I never saw before. With¬ 
out any romance, it was literally hung with roses as 
you would see onions tied on ropes for a country fair. 
Last winter the row was turned into a hedge in two 
days ; a row of stakes were set a yard or so apart down 
the middle of the row, and then straight hazel rods put 
in horizontally and tied to the upright stakes; the un¬ 
pruned shoots of the roses were trained at full length, 
right and left, against the rods, and the whole was kept 
as low as we could, so as not to shade the peach border 
too much. It is only a little better than a yard high, 
and shall be kept to that height. Now to do this pro¬ 
perly, will explain what I mean to do with all the un¬ 
pruned roses for the rest of the season. We have trained 
raspberry canes in various ways time out of mind, some 
upright, some slanting to one side, and others arched 
over between stool and stool; and as soon as the crop 
was over, in my younger days, the canes which produced 
it were cut out, no matter how green their leaves might 
be at the time; this was told me to be for lettiug in 
more light and air to the canes which w r ere to bear next 
year, and that cutting away the bearing canes as above 
would give all the benefit of the roots to those for the 
next year's bearing. But whether all this was right or 
wrong, or partly both ways, is not for me to say. Mr. 
Errington must know all about it, and can explain it 
better than is necessary for me to try on this occasion. 
But I well recollect that under that system, for years and 
years, I used to see the best crops of raspberries; and, 
therefore, I intend to try the same plan with these roses, 
with only a little variation. Indeed, I am doing so just 
now, and I think it will answer capitally. The rasp¬ 
berry canes were allowed to ripen the fruit, and no 
more; the rose shoots will be allowed only time to ripen 
their flowers, and not even that in some cases; lor I see 
that as soon as the top rose on a long shoot is lull 
blown, and so will not allow the shoot to extend any 
more in that direction, the eyes on the bare part of this 
shoot begin to grow away in earnest, and exhibit that 
impatience at restraint which caused people to give up 
the plan of training down roses in the rose beds. Now 
there is a philosophical knot on this shoot, just between 
the flower-bearing top part and that portion of it just 
breaking into new shoots, which, if I had the necessary 
time to discuss, I should like very much to cut, it only 
half-way through, as they do for layering rose shoots; 
