25:2 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER- 
shines all day, if possible, for a nursery; and strike all 
the cuttings without pots underhand-glasses, that is at 
this early period of the season ; and later 1 would strike 
them in close single cucumber-boxes, with or without a 
slight hottom-lieat, according to the season. No bottom- 
heat is necessary till we get into September ; and every 
cutting I know of will winter better if rooted without 
bottom-heat, or even much close confinement. But let 
us go on with the hand-lights: place one of these on 
your border next to an alley or a walk, beginning at one 
end, and it will leave a square mark on the ground, then 
take out the natural soil from within this mark just two 
inches deep, and lay it all round the outside of the 
marked parts; this will add to the depth of the bed 
within this glass-mark a little; but it is hardly wanted, 
for two inches is quite deep enough to strike cuttings of 
our Shrubland scarlet geraniums, the strongest of the 
family. Now put in one inch of any light compost, hut 
first of all sprinkle a handful of soot on the bottom, to 
keep down the worms, then tlio compost of half sand 
and half leaf-mould, or any light rich refuse, and cover 
the whole with an inch of clean sand; water this so 
that the whole is damped through, and let it settle for a 
while to drain; then press down the sand gently with 
the bottom of a flower-pot, if nothing handier is at com¬ 
mand, and your contrivance is at once fit for cuttings. 
I forget how many cuttings ought to he put under a 
common hand-glass,hut one or two rows across the sand 
is quite enough of any one sort for a place of almost any 
extent after making an allowance of ten per cent, for 
failures between this and next spring. After planting 
the cuttings, and no deeper than just to hold them in 
their places, give them a good watering with a fine-rose 
pot, so as to settle the surface about them and wet the 
whole to the bottom. After all this let it stand without 
the glass for an hour or so until the leaves get dry, but 
the sun should not strike on them to dry them ; and as 
I suppose the cuttings to he on a south border, it will be 
necessary to shade them at first, and also the glass, from 
ten in the morning to four in the afternoon; and for the 
first week the cuttings managed on this plan, that is full 
in the sun, ought to be damped every morning with a fine 
rose when the shades are put on, but no more need be 
given than will just wet the leaves and the surface 
of the sand. 
Under this management verbena and petunia cut¬ 
tings will root in about half the time they would re¬ 
quire on a north aspect; and we all know the sooner a 
cutting of any kind roots, the more healthy the young 
plant will be: and another great secret in making 
such cuttings at this season, or, indeed, at any other, 
is to have them as short as it is possible to handle 
them ; and from the very tips of the shoots, or from little 
side-shoots from near the bottom. If we say two or two 
and a half inches long for such cuttings it will be suf¬ 
ficient; one thing we must all avoid in choosing cut 
tings of soft-wooded plants, and that is long-jointed 
shoots. Sometimes you will meet with a plant, say a 
petunia, that has all the joints up to very near the top 
as long as I want the whole cuttings to he; but rather 
than make use of such leggy things for cuttings I would 
be content to take an inch from the very top, above the 
uppermost long joint. Sometimes when one gives away 
a few cuttings to a neighbour the state of tire shoots are 
never thought of, and it may happen that one can hardly 
get a really good cutting out of a large bundle of shoots: 
this is very provoking; and no less so, when you get a 
tin-boxful of rose shoots, to bud from, through the post, 
and find when you unpack them that not a bud is to he 
seen : the shoots being cut too young, or so old that all 
the buds on them are started into little shoots, and ten 
to one if these young shoots are old enough to make 
cuttings : but then the disappointment ends here ; not 
so, however, that from the long-legged cutting—you 
[July 25. j 
may plant it and it will root like the rest, and when the i 
time comes you pot it and all of them from the cutting J 
class, water them, and put the little pots under the hand- j 
glass, and shade for a few days; then you take off the 
glass at night the first week after potting, to inure ! 
your little plants to stand the open air ; by-and-bye you ' 
place the pots in a sheltered situation, and all goes on j 
to your mind until the first high winds come to sweep | 
over them,—then snap goes the long-legged plants, or 
those made from long-jointed cuttings, because the tops 
were too heavy; and now there is not another eye below 
to make a fresh shoot, or if there is it is the very bottom 
one, and is buried with the roots, and will hardly push. 
D. Beaton. 
GREENHOUSE AND WINDOW 
GARDENING. 
FERTILIZATION OF SEEDS. 
Hybridising. —That there should be distinct male 
and female organs in the flowers of plants, is one of 
those facts that forcibly strike the attention of those 
just commencing the study of vegetable phenomena. A 
floating, half real, half mythical belief in this principle 
has existed since the days of Empedocles, who attributed 
to plants desires, passions, and feelings somewhat 
analogous to those existing in the animal creation; it 
was reserved for the great Linnaeus to establish, incontro- 
vertibly, the presence of these distinctive sexual organs, 
and to make the number and the position of stamens and 
pistils the groundwork for his famous artificial arrange¬ 
ment of plants into classes and orders. The knowledge 
of this sexual system forms the foundation for all im¬ 
provements in the races of our vegetables, fruits, roots, 
and flowers; without the perfect action of these organs 
upon each other there can be no true fruit, no fertile 
seeds. True, what is generally termed the fruit —such 
as the eatable part of a melon, the melting pulp of a 
peach, the solid, useful part of a cucumber—may re¬ 
spectively swell and be fit for use, but unless there has 
been an influence exerted by the pollen dust from the 
anther boxes of the stamens upon the summit, or stigma, 
of the pistil, or upon some cellular tissued part of the 
pistil if the stigma be wanting, there can be no produc¬ 
tion of true seeds in the fruit—such seeds as afterwards 
will vegetate and grow. When the mere covering of 
the true fruit is all that is wished—such, for instance, 
as in a long, symmetrical, green cucumber, fit for the 
table—the desired result may be obtained as well, often 
better, without the fertilizing process as with it. Hence, 
when at times I wished to grow fine looking, long, sym¬ 
metrical cucumbers, I used to tie a string round the 
female blossom of the fruit before opening, to prevent 
all possibility of fertilization, either by winds, or hy bees 
or flies carrying the fertilizing pollen on their legs or 
wings, and J did so because in the finer races of cucum- j 
hers fertile seeds are generally attended with knobby j 
excrescences on the fruit, which, however desirable to i 
contemplate when seed is the object, are not very | 
pleasing when symmetry of form is the desideratum. 
One reason why peaches and nectarines drop off'when 
the stoning process commences, in addition to allowing 
too many fruit to remain, is owing to a deficiency in the , 
fertilizing process when the trees were in bloom, as in 
houses where the fertilization was assisted hy scattering 
the pollen by means of fans and camel hair brushes I 
have scarcely ever had a fruit drop during stoning. 
Even here the stone will frequently lie formed, and the 
kernel, or true seed, or fruit, be defective. When, how¬ 
ever, in favourable circumstances, ripe pollen is shed 
upon a healthy pistil, it sends out a tube, which, though 
not more than the one-thousandth part of an inch in 
diameter, penetrates the style, or stalk, of the pistil, and 
fertilizes the ovules in the seed vessel at its base. 
