September 19.] THE COTTAG. 
goodness knows, we have heads enough already on that 
string. There is now a race of young men learning 
gardening and botany all over the kingdom, to whom 
this new dictionary will be quite a treasure, and it is on 
their account, and for them only, that I, an old gardener, 
have thus broken out of my weekly tract to say so, and 
to advise them most earnestly to study the new way of 
I giving English finishings to the names of plants, and 
S the orders to which they belong ; for of all the improve¬ 
ments in gardening books, in my time, this is by far the 
greatest; and if Dr. Lindley had done no more for gar¬ 
dening and botany by his books hut this very thing, the 
next generation would call him a great reformer, who 
had done more for us gardeners in His day and genera¬ 
tion than all his contemporaries—just as we talk at pre¬ 
sent of the great Linnaeus, who, although he did not 
live to see our days, had seen them afar off. This great 
man was certainly the worldly cause of my ever being a 
gardener; for when 1 was a little fellow they intended to 
make a gentleman of me, hut before I left school, I got 
hold of a book—and such a book—written by Linnaeus 
himself, and translated into English. It went by the 
name of “ Lee’s Botany,” and when I think of it even 
now my hair stands on end! there were a thousand 
words in it as long as the handle of my pen, and as hard 
to be pronounced as the language of the Cossacks, and 
yet I very nearly got it all “by heart;” and it so fired 
my young Highland spirits, that I disdained to be made 
a gentleman of. I would be a philosopher some day. 
But I soon found out that the first step in the progress 
of a philosopher of this stamp was to get down into a 
“ stoke-hole ’’ to make up the fires, and to clean out the 
stoke-hole and all about the fire every Saturday, to screen 
the ashes, and to return the cinders to the old stoke¬ 
hole again to be ready to “ damp down ” the fires with 
the last thing at night. And they did damp the fires, and 
damped something else besides; but no matter—the young 
philosopher, in course of time, was trusted “to give air, 
and to look at the thermometers. As to making cuttings, 
he knew all about them already—he rooted two Balm ot 
Gilead cuttings out of three before he left school; what 
he wanted was a book beyond “ Lee’s Botany,” in short, 
a dictionary, like this that we are now getting ready for 
the cottager. But at that time they could no more write 
such a book, than they could lay down railroads or sink 
telegraphic wires under the English Channel. They 
have a custom in the Highlands, and in other wild parts 
of the world, that, where a great chief or some one ot 
consequence had fallen in battle, every one who passed by 
that way should cast a stone into his “ cairn,” and a 
heap of stones was thus collected together: and that is j ust 
the way that the best hooks are produced, and more 
particularly plant dictionaries and catalogues, and in 
this manner the cairn has accumulated from the days 
of Linnaeus to this, from which materials are obtained 
which we now recast, and to which we add the mites 
from our own experience to form a most useful garden¬ 
ing dictionary. Indeed, natives of all climes, who have 
written down their thoughts or their experience on 
matters connected with this book, have, in fact, cast 
their stone into the common cairn, and the book itself 
will, in its turn at some future day, be as one of these 
stones—a unit in the accumulating heap. Linnaeus 
laid the concrete, Jussieu and Deoandolle were the 
master-mason and bricklayer, and Dr. Lindley the 
chief architect of this our dictionary, and we, whose 
names have been advertised as the humble bees, are, in 
fact, only the bricklayers, hodmen, and thatcliers of the 
firm; and when we get the roof covered in, the editor 
must do the painting and polishing. But amongst us 
all, if we do not produce a first-rate article, we ought to 
be ashamed of ourselves, and some of us, at least, be 
sent back to the stoke-hole again, to dampers and all. 
Boses.— For many years past I have gone over all our 
E GARDENER. 319 
Perpetual roses about the middle of September, with a 
pair of gloves and a sharp knife, and give every one a 
particular kind of pruning; and I find the plan so very 
useful, that I would no more put it off, or do it earlier in 
the season, than I would give up pruning roses alto¬ 
gether. I believe one half the best rose growers do the 
same, but, somehow or other, the thing has not become 
fashionable enough to he treated of in books or maga¬ 
zines; but I rejoice to see that many more things which 
we treat of for the first time in this—our friend The 
Cottage Gardener — soon take root, and wings and 
spread among our brethren—on principle , no doubt 
—for the good of others. If for no other reason, 
therefore, I would strongly recommend this subject to 
all gardeners, from the palace down to ourselves, as 
one of the most useful joints in the machinery for grow¬ 
ing good late roses; we cut roses here from the open 
ground generally up to or down to Christinas; and I am 
quite sure that with a little pains now, there are many 
rose lovers who may gratify their taste, by taking a leaf 
out of our book. 
Like every thing else that is done in a garden, this 
should be performed, year by year, on some fixed plau. 
If you put a man to count straws only, you ought to 
make him do it, or tell him how to do it, systematically ; 
and not allow him to put the counted ones in the bundle 
heads and tails. Money is no more the root of all evil 
than system is the root and branches of good gardening, 
and of good everything else that we do. Well, then, 
this system of managing to have lots of roses late in 
the season,Ms to begin about the end of May, when the 
flower-buds are three parts grown, and you can see 
which of them promise to have the finest blown roses ; 
many of the “ green centres" can then be detected ; and 
if an insect or grub has nibbled the buds, that also can 
be seen, with other imperfections, if there be any. All 
such buds are pulled, or rather cut clean out with a 
knife—for I dislike very much pulling about any plant 
or part of a plant—after that those buds that ha,ve only 
small shoots to support them are done away with, and 
by this time perhaps one-third of the whole crop is gone, 
and that is enough on good rose soil, where the plants 
grow very well; but on thin land, and where roses do 
but moderately, one halt of the flower-buds ought to be 
taken oft', and the other half left on the best and strongest 
shoots to flower. Some people say, that if you want 
good late flowers, and to spare your plants, all the first 
show of flower-buds should be destroyed; and I have 
tried that many a time, but I do not believe in the doc¬ 
trine at all, for I never could make out that half a crop 
in June did any harm to that oi the October iollowing. 
Others, again, cut back the shoots at the end of May, to 
get late roses, but that is an extraordinary bad fashion, 
which no one would indulge in who knew any thing pi 
vegetable life. It is just as if a farmer were to let his 
calves suck the cows dry, and expect to have cream and 
fresh butter nevertheless. The leaves being the repre¬ 
sentatives of the cows, the gardener who cuts down his 
roses in the middle of the growing season is that of the 
sucking calves, and the buds and full blown roses the 
cream and butter. Instead ot two crops ot roses by 
this system of cutting back the shoots at the end of 
May, the fact is, that the poor plants are forced to give 
three crops of moderate bloom instead of two good ones. 
At that early season the next bud or two below the cut 
part are in leaf in ten days, and in bloom by the end of 
June, so that cutting back hinders the autumnal crop 
very much, instead of easing the plants, as some know¬ 
ing folks suppose. 
The first crop is put off only three weeks in some 
seasons, and not more than a month or five weeks at 
any time; and cut as we may we cannot altei the nature 
of a rose-tree more than that oi any other plant; and it 
is in the nature of Perpetual roses to make a iresh growth 
