June 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
tivation. I mention this, because some young be¬ 
ginners, who can hardly make a rose bush blossom 
out of doors, may think that if they had it in a pot 
it would be all right. Just as many of that class kill 
their plants with too much kindness, thinking that 
when anything is the matter with them they are to 
be brought round again with liquid manure, whereas 
that finishes them effectually. There is no more 
difficulty, however, in growing roses in pots than 
there is in growing fuchsias the same way. Roses 
plunged in pots require to be regularly watered in 
dry weather, and, although mulched with a thick coat 
of rotten dung, you may water them each time with 
rich liquid manure. The whole secret of getting a 
flue healthy bloom of roses anywhere, and particu¬ 
larly in pots, is to allow them constantly the very 
richest diet; to keep them clean from insects and 
grubs; and to see that they are not crowded, either 
with too many branches or among themselves. Let 
every individual plant have a free open space all 
round it, to let in the. sun and air to the very heart 
of it, and by the end of the first growing season the 
plants ought to be in good conditon to Dower well 
next spring, and with ordinary attention they will 
keep improving for many years, that is, provided 
they are not much forced. When they are strongly 
forced to flower much out of season, it has the same 
effect on them as forcing has on the hyacinth, and 
they take a year or two to get over the check; but to 
flower them six weeks before their usual time will 
not hurt them even the first season, and as they get 
old they will assume a habit of early blooming, and 
thus a plant that would be much weakened if made 
to bloom at first as early as the middle of April, will 
in a few years acquire the habit of blooming naturally 
as it were at that time, and with a little management 
could be made to bloom a month earlier without dis¬ 
tressing it too much. 
The great use of roses in pots is to prolong their 
season of flowering; to have them in bloom two 
months before their natural season in spring, and to 
prolong their season in the autumn. It is not worth 
while to bloom roses in pots from the end of May 
to the middle or end of August; and, if it were, the 
short time they keep in bloom would not pay for the 
trouble. Nurserymen and others who grow them 
for competition bestow much labour on those they 
exhibit in June and July ; and one may admire this 
excess of diligence, and finely grown plants of any 
sort are admired by lovers of gardening, but, com¬ 
pared to an ordinary display of roses in the open 
ground, these summer pot-roses seem almost child¬ 
ish. Nevertheless, these public exhibitions of sum¬ 
mer roses do much good, as the public can see them 
in then- best attire ; and, by comparing one with the 
other, a better judgment can be formed on the merits 
of new ones, or of those that we did not before see. 
The more successful growers, besides carrying off 
the best prizes, get up their names in tiiis branch of 
commerce—and a name is everything in trade ; but, 
for private growers in general, and especially for 
those in large towns, to suppose that they can grow 
and bloom roses in the height of summer, by merely 
putting them in pots, is not to be thought of; but any 
one with a few spare lights, or an ordinary green¬ 
house, and the requisite degree of perseverance, 
may assuredly add a great feature to his rooms, 
early and late in'the season, by a few dozens of pot- 
roses. Like every other branch of gardening, the 
first resolution to begin a fair start is often the most 
difficult part of the business ; and, as to failures, the 
best gardeners do not look for success in every 
131 
experiment; if they can but see clearly the main 
points of a new experiment before they begin, they 
risk the minor details, and every failure is as siu - e to 
instruct them as the most successful attempt. Let 
no one, therefore, put off' the pot cultivation of a 
few roses, at least, from any idea that the thing is 
troublesome or costly. Indeed, the expense of keep, 
ing a large number of roses in pots is a mere 
nothing. They require no house protection from 
frost, and, except a few tea-scented roses, will do 
.better from the open ground, after a hard winter, 
than if they were coddled up in a greenhouse. 
Let us now suppose that a good selection of pot 
roses is got ready by the 1st of February, the pots 
well filled with young roots, and the shoots cut back 
last October according to their strength; the very 
strongest shoots being left from six to nine inches 
long, the longest to have only five buds, and all above 
that number to be picked out with the knife. Now, 
this rule is sadly neglected, but it is so essential as 
to amount to a principle. The usual way of pruning 
roses and all other bushes is to cut down to so many 
buds. Now, I want five buds on the strongest branch, 
and sometimes you may meet with half a dozen buds 
at the bottom of some shoots in the space of two or 
three inches, and if I cut down to the fifth bud from 
the bottom, and so on with all the other shoots on a 
well grown rose plant, the consequence would be 
that all the young branches that would come up after 
pruning would issue from almost the same point, 
and so be as thickly set together as “ three in a bed,” 
and smother each other; but by cutting the shoots 
at different lengths according to their strength, and 
afterwards taking out the buds, except those wanted 
to form a tolerably open head, we lay the framework 
or skeleton of the future plant with much greater 
ease. Therefore, at the first pruning for flowers the 
strongest shoots need not, or rather should not, be 
cut closer than nine inches from the old stem, one 
bud being left at the extremity, another near the 
bottom, and three more at equal distances between 
the two, and all the rest on that shoot to be disbudded. 
The second sized branches may be cut at six inches 
from the bottom, and three buds left on them; and 
the third size, if any, need not be left longer than a 
couple of inches, and only one bud left on them. 
But now let us suppose that our plants had been so 
well managed during the growing season as that 
each produced five shoots of equal strength, and well 
balanced as to the distances between them. In that 
case each would be cut into nine inches, and if the 
fiee stumps were tied out nearly horizontally, so that 
they would radiate from tire centre like the spokes 
of a wheel, we shoidd have the foundation for a bush 
eighteen or twenty inches in diameter at once; and 
if five buds were left on each of the radiating stumps 
as above, and each of them formed a shoot, there 
would be too many shoots for the diameter of the 
head; but that is just what I am aiming at. When 
the shoots were so far grown that one could sec which 
were the most promising for blooming, one half 
would be stopped when not more than four inches 
long, and the rest left to flower; or say a dozen 
flowering shoots and as many spurs, for the stopped 
ones would be kept short all the season. At the next 
pruning, all these shoots and spurs would be cut in 
to one eye from the horizontal branches, and the same 
every year afterwards, unless it were intended to in¬ 
crease the size of the head in diameter. In this case, 
the shoots at the extremities of the branches must be 
left three or four inches in length, and brought to the 
horizontal position like the parent shoot. 
