266 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER. 
August 
then planted round the side of a pot in pure sand or 
in light soil, and they soon root. Gardeners say if 
they get a strong sucker of this crassula, or of a pine¬ 
apple, or of an aloe, or indeed of any plant that is 
grown from suckers, half the battle of rearing the 
future plant is won at the outset; therefore, when 
there is a choice of suckers, they always take the 
strongest they can find. The way we keep up our 
stock of them is this: after the bloom is over we take 
a few of the strongest plants, with healthy roots, and 
cut them down as far as where the flowering shoot 
issued from, put them under a glass—that is, in any 
of the pits or houses—water them once a week till 
November, and only once in three weeks through the 
winter. The stumps will soon begin to make suckers, 
and by the middle of March there is a crowd of them 
on each plant: these we take off, and sort them into 
sizes; the very largest are put into thumb-pots in 
nothing but sand, and by the end of May they get a 
shift into three-inch pots, and are kept close to the 
glass till the beginning of August, when they are 
removed outside, and placed with the tall crassulas, 
close under the south wall of one of the hothouses, 
and plunged in sand; but they are not watered, the 
dews, side rains, and the dampness or shelter of the 
sand being sufficient moisture for their leaves and 
roots; in short, they are now digesting the food they 
stored while they were regularly watered; and, if the 
autumn turns out a wet one, we remove them to a 
cold pit, still giving them all the air and sun possible, 
and by the end of the season they are generally strong 
enough to flower next year. This, then, is very 
similar to the treatment of the late scarlet crassulas; 
the only difference being that our crassula falcata is 
not watered in the autumn. They are wintered on a 
shelf close to the glass in the coldest greenhouse, 
without any water at all, excepting in a hard frosty 
winter, when there is more sunlight and fire-heat, 
which would shrivel them up unless a little water 
was given to them now and then. They would also 
require a little water once in three weeks if wintered 
in the window of a warm room.. 
In March—that is, twelve months after they were 
taken as suckers—they are potted into five-inch pots, 
in the same compost as the other crassulas, but I do 
not think the kind of soil is of much importance, 
provided it is open and well drained, and 1 have no 
doubt they would flower very well in fine sifted coal- 
ashes. Of this batch the whole sometimes flower, 
but after a wet or very dull autumn some of them 
grow on without flowering, and this is considered 
good luck, because when they make two seasons’ 
growth their flower heads are much finer, and their 
suckers are also much stronger. After they are 
shifted into their flowering pots, they are regularly 
watered till they have done flowering, and a little 
forcing will not hurt them, but it must be given in 
May, and only till their centre stem begins to grow 
away rapidly for bloom ; any forcing or confinement 
after that is certain to injure them more or less. 
We must now return to the second-sized suckers, 
or more properly offsets. They are grown the first 
season in store pots—that is, about nine or ten off¬ 
sets in a nine-inch pot—for they are too small to 
flower well under two years’ growth, and by the 
time they are twelve months old they are either 
potted singly in three-inch pots, or, if they are con¬ 
sidered small, they are left in the store pots till the 
end of May, when they are planted in light soil, 
close to the front of one of the houses, and taken up 
in August, and potted at once in the pots they are 
intended to flower in. After all, I think this is the I 
t best way to manage them, only I would make the 
rule of potting them early in August absolute. 
Those who never saw this plant in bloom may be 
curious to know what kind of flower it is, but I can¬ 
not bring any plant to mind that I can liken it to. 
It is a kalosanthes sure enough, for lcalos means 
beautiful, and antlios a flower; it is even more than 
that, for, to say the least of it, when well managed 
it is a most beautiful thing. It rises from 10 to 12 
inches above the pot, and on the top of a central 
column a great number of little flowers grow quite 
close together, forming a circular head, flat on the 
top, and from three to five or six inches in diameter; 
the colour is scarlet and gold, and the plant is as 
easily grown as a common cactus, and lasts in bloom 
a month or six weeks. 
Myrtles, Oleanders, and Camellias.— From the 
middle to the end of August is the best time in the 
year to put in cuttings of these. The camellia cut¬ 
tings have been already treated on, and the other 
two require much the same treatment. The fashion¬ 
able way of striking myrtle cuttings is to put a plant 
into a close damp hothouse early in June, so that the 
young shoots are as soft as those of a verbena, and 
when they are a couple of inches long they are taken 
off for cuttings, planted in pots with sand on the top, 
bell-glasses put over them, and then plunged into * 
bottom-heat. Nine-tenths of the very hard woody 
plants, such as is the myrtle, will readily strike under 
that excitement, but that kind of work is only fit 
for first-rate propagators, and ordinary people must 
content themselves with the old-fashioned way of 
slow and sure work. Myrtle cuttings take a long 
time to root, but they may be made any time from 
February to September. Those made now require 
less attention, and are more sure to root by the ordi¬ 
nary treatment than such as are made at any other 
season, and as they must be left in the cutting pots 
till next spring, and be watered all through the 
winter, the pots should be particularly well prepared 
for them. Six-inch pots are about the best size for 
them, drained with an inch deep of small cinder- 
ashes, then a little good mould over that for the roots 
to feed on when they reach down so far, and then 
the pot filled with a very light compost of half sand 
and half sandy loam. To make the pot look more 
tidy, a thin layer of clean sand might be put on the 
top, but that is not essential for the cuttings. The 
pot is then well watered, and put by till the cuttings 
are made. The reason for first watering the cutting- 
pot is that the soil in it will press harder together 
than if only ordinarily moist, and the closer the soil 
or the sand is made for hard-wooded cuttings, such 
as those of the myrtle, the more certain are they to 
root. Now, if a gardener had a large myrtle plant 
to choose cuttings from, lie would only take the little 
side shoots about three or four inches long, with an 
inch or so of the bottom quite brown from being 
ripe ; he would not cut them but slip them from the 
branch, and after cutting away the two lower leaves 
they would be ready to plant. The next best cuttings 
would be the top of side shoots that ripened all the 
way up except a couple of inches at the very top; 
then, by taking two joints of the brown wood along 
with the green tops, very good cuttings may be made. 
Of course these could not be made slip-cuttings like 
the former, but they would be cut across under the 
second joint of ripe wood in the usual way. The 
reason for taking a little ripe wood at the bottom of 
the cuttings is to prevent them damping in the soil, 
as they would be more likely to do if they were all of 
green wood. When the cuttings are ready, plant 
