August 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
243 
in the spring are ready for being forced into early 
bloom, or left to come in by the natural warmth of the 
season. This is the usual mode followed by gardeners, 
but the August cuttings answer just as well and are 
attended with less trouble, for some of the February 
cuttings often flower the same season, and then they 
are so small as not to be worth the trouble of keeping 
them. It also happens, occasionally, that with some 
of the August cuttings the flower-buds are formed 
before they are separated from the parent plant, but 
if they are quickly rooted that does not injure the 
size of the flower-heads. The best way to make the 
August cuttings is to cut them about four or five 
inches long, to remove the two lowest leaves, and 
to pick out the two buds belonging to them, as I 
suggested for strong rose cuttings : this- will pre¬ 
vent suckers from growing, which will be of some ad¬ 
vantage when the plants come to flower the second 
season, as we always find that two and three-year- 
old plants flower unequally. These bottom eyes, if 
not cut out at first, will get up as strong suckers, 
depriving the rest of their share of nourishment, en¬ 
abling them to flower sooner and much larger than 
the others. There is one disadvantage in August- 
made cuttings well known to gardeners, which is, that 
the flowers of them come all of one colour, and that 
the same as that of the parent plant, whether it be 
blue or pink; but those made in February may be 
made to flower blue or pink at will. If the mother 
plant produced blue flowers in the former seasons, 
and you force it in February, cut off your cuttings as 
soon as they make three joints, and when they are 
rooted qtlace them in a rich, light compost, say one- 
half leaf-mould or very rotten dung, and the rest of 
any good garden soil, they never fail to produce pink 
flowers; whereas, if taken Rom a pink flowering 
parent, and after rooting growing them in strong 
yellow loam, with, about a sixth part of iron filings 
mixed with it instead of sand, nine out of ten of them 
will produce blue flowers. I have proved this over 
and over again, and have seen it in other hands, but 
I never could get an August cutting to differ in colour 
from that of the parent plant. The reason seems to 
be that the juices of the parent plant have already, 
by a season’s growth, formed the substance, or the 
organized matter, as physiologists call it, out of 
which flowers are produced, so that no after treatment 
is able to counteract the effect; whereas cuttings 
separated from a plant at so early an age as when 
they only attain a few inches in length, and are then 
made to grow in iron rust and loam otherwise im¬ 
pregnated with iron, which is well known to favour 
the production of blue flowers in the hydrangea, the 
organized matter referred to is formed from juices 
impregnated with iron oxide, and so produce blue 
flowers. The intensity of the blue is, I believe, ac¬ 
cording to the'perfect oxidation of the iron. Chalk- 
water never fails to counteract this effect of the oxide 
on the flowers, as we have often proved here, so that, 
to give the fairest chance to the experiment of get¬ 
ting blue hydrangeas, I would recommend the cut¬ 
tings to be taken as early in the spring as possible, 
to strike or root them in red rand, to grow them in 
nothing but red loam and iron filings, according to 
the above proportions, and never to water them but 
with rain-water: but I am not sure whether rusty 
water from hot-water pipes would not add to the 
success of the experiment; at any rate this rusty 
water is not injurious to these hydrangeas. In some 
parts of the country the natural soil will produce blue 
hydrangeas, and in such places it is difficult to meet 
with pink ones ; and, wliat is singular enough, the 
rhododendrons will flourish in such soil, although 
apparently devoid of all traces of vegetable matter. 
There is also a kind of peat earth which invariably 
turns the pink to a blue hydrangea, but all the peat 
that we have access to here does just the contrary. 
To have pink hydrangeas next summer, let us, there¬ 
fore, make our cuttings now from pink parents; and, 
if we wish them blue, we must take the cuttings at 
this season from blue flowering plants, for we cannot 
alter the colour now. 
Geraniums. —When I first came to treat of these 
plants in The Cottage Gardener, I made no hesi¬ 
tation in calling them by their old and original 
family name—geranium. The nature and import¬ 
ance of ancient family names and clanships formed 
the first prominent feature in my infant education, 
and that may account for my predilection for old 
names and ancient lineage. Knowing also that 
household words are to us what household gods were 
to the ancients, and that the one is as easily changed 
as the other, and, moreover, being then a stranger 
by name to the class of readers I was going to 
address, I concluded naturally enough that if I 
began by first unsettling the endearments and asso¬ 
ciations of family or household terms, by calling a 
geranium “pelargonium,” a fuchsia “fuxia,” and so 
on, I should be set down as a pedantic writer, and 
disturber of things as they are. Or who knows but 
some would say, “ He is a revolutionist;” and a first 
impression on that side of the question was then 
more likely to damage the reputation of the work 
than otherwise. So the pelargonium was called a 
geranium on that account; and I intended, at the 
end of the second vol., to give this explanation, and 
to adopt the more modern name in future, but the 
definition of the two families, or rather the two 
names, having been given at page 222, in answer to 
the Rev. P. S., I made up my mind to write pelargo¬ 
nium in future ; and I would strong urge on young 
people on the fair side of thirty to accustom them¬ 
selves to the more fashionable name pelargonium. 
The title of the new name, however, is not worth a 
straw: it was given by L’Heritier, a French bota¬ 
nist ; and in his time the influence of Linnaeus’ 
mode of counting the stamens was in full force. 
It has since been proved, in many other instances as 
well as in the Geraniaceae, that the number of sta¬ 
mens is a variable feature, and not to be relied on 
for generic distinctions. All the wild erodiums, 
pelargoniums, and geraniums, have ten stamens, 
and all of them have half that number of seeds. 
These stamens are defective from three to five in 
different species, that is, three to five out of the ten 
bear false anthers, or none at all. All the cultivated 
hybrid varieties of pelargoniums have only seven 
stamens as their greatest number, the abortive ones 
having given way under cultivation; but some have 
only five stamens, and of these some are fertile and 
some are not, so that the more the stamens of 
Geraniaceae are studied with a view to family dis¬ 
tinctions the less perceptible these distinctions ap¬ 
pear. They are evidently of the same importance 
here as in the rhododendron, rhodora, and azalea, 
that is, of no importance at all. The next feature 
to distinguish these two so-called families is a regu¬ 
lar and irregular corolla, or the petals being regular 
in the one and irregular in the other: this is a poor 
and very slender pretension to build a family name 
on. More than one-half of the wild pelargoniums 
have their petals almost, if not altogether, exactly of 
the same size, and of course regular; and among the 
erodiums, which is only a well marked section, many 
