September 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER; 
323 
diseased through some derangement of its roots or 
leaves. In these respects plants differ very little 
from animals. A lean beast with scanty pasture may 
still have a good appetite and a healthy stomach, and 
rich nourishing food will soon make him fat and 
sleek again. It is just so with a plant under similar 
circumstances; but let either a plant or an animal 
be deranged in the lungs, or in the digestive organs, 
and give him strong stimulating food, or ardent 
spirits, and you will kill him with over kindness. 
When any thing is wrong with plants, therefore, liquid 
manure is the last remedy that should be thought of. 
Even very strong plants may be injured by it in the 
dull winter season, and I cannot now recollect a pot 
plant in this department, except the chrysanthemum, 
which is at all benefited by this way of feeding; 
and I would advise liquid manure to be given up 
now till the next season sees our feeders in healthy 
motion. 
Excrements from Roots .—One more absurdity, and 
I have done with the subject for a time, and that 
is a notion that obtained a strong hold on the com¬ 
mon mind of the whole country a few years since, 
that plants were endowed with the power of dis¬ 
charging the useless or unappropriated part of their 
food as excrements by their roots. What a libel on 
nature ! A plant may have ten thousand mouths at 
each extremity, for all parts of young roots and old 
leaves are full of mouths, and feed by them too; and 
even school children know by this time that the food 
of plants is digested by and in the leaves; and seeing, 
or rather knowing, that leaves have as many mouths 
as roots have, why should not the refuse of the food 
be discharged by the nearest mouth? It is so, and 
constantly by a copious perspiration. The invisible 
vapour constantly thrown off by the leaves under the 
action of light is the true and only excrement of 
plants. The leaves digest the food and throw off 
what is useless of it, and to enable them to execute 
this task, Dr. Lindley has said that “ God has formed 
them with wisdom no less infinite than has been dis¬ 
played in the creation of man.” All this and much 
more that might be said shows how essential it is for 
the welfare of our plants that their leaves should be 
taken the greatest care of in order to keep them clean 
and in sound action. 
Tropceolum. tricolorum, —Now for a little practi¬ 
cal gardening. This is a good time to plant the tubers 
of the Tropceolum tricolorum (three-coloured nastur¬ 
tium), one of the very prettiest little greenhouse or 
window climbers that one can grow. The roots, as 
we say improperly instead of tubers, are not unlike 
red potatoes, only they have but one eye; this is 
about their natural time to begin to grow, and they 
grow on all the winter, their slender branches taking 
hold of any kind of support to raise themselves by, 
and their leaves are like shamrocks in miniature. 
Their flowers, which come late in the spring, are pro¬ 
duced as thickly as blackberries, and so exquisitely 
beautiful, and so close together, that a string of them, 
just as they naturally grow, would make a necklace 
for a pretty young girl. The colour is orange, crimson, 
and black—three colours—or tricolor, as the Latin 
name signifies. The tubers are sold in the nurseries 
like hyacinths, and not much dearer, not even so dear 
as a good new hyacinth. There is no plant, that I 
know, that I would sooner recommend to a friend 
than this, and the training of it should be left, if pos¬ 
sible, to young ladies, as it is almost cruelty to see 
great heavy gardeners handling such delicate things 
with their rough fingers and corny thumbs. Strangers 
will find them most difficult to increase by cuttings, 
as they require such nicety in their management; and, 
when they do strike, it must be under a bell-glass, 
and the first year’s tubers will not be bigger than a 
pea. But presently I shall let the cat out of the bag, 
and tell of a mode by which they increase at the 
roots like potatoes, only not so many at a time. They 
keep in bloom a long time, and then fade off like a 
tulip, when either the pots may be put by on a dry 
shelf, or the tubers may be shaken out of the soil, and 
put in a drawer or any safe place till about this time. 
They must not be moved from pot to pot like most 
plants, but be at once put into the pot they are to 
flower in, and any light rich mould will suit them. 
The top soil from a cucumber-bed, with a little sand, 
wordd do; or if it was one half peat and the other 
half from a heap of compost-mould it would do. They 
do not require much water for the first six weeks till 
they make plenty of roots, and after that they may 
be watered like any other plants that are growing. 
After potting they may be left in the open air and in 
the sun till the frost comes, and a window would do 
very well for them after that. They might also be 
set outside on any fine warm day through the winter, 
for a few hours in the middle of the day. 
Pots about nine or ten inches wide will suit them 
best, and, if one could get them, those called “ upright 
pots” are far better for the way I propose to grow them, 
which is very peculiar. It is thus:—after a very 
good drainage, place three inches of soil, and then the 
tuber in the centre, then fill up till the soil is just one 
inch above the tuber, so that the pot is not half full ; 
give one good watering, and see that the soil does not 
get too dry aftei’wards. By-and-by, a tiny shoot will 
come up, and, when it is six inches long, bend it 
across to the side of the pot very gently, and place 
an inch of fresh soil over it, so that only a little of 
the top is out of the soil, and leaning against the pot. 
Let it grow on again until the shoot is nearly a foot 
long, then bend it down and coil it round the pot, 
adding another inch of soil, leaving the point free 
from the buried part of the stem. By this coiling, 
fresh tubers are produced for increasing the stock, 
but planted in the usual way near the top of the pot 
no such increase can be had. Continue this way till 
the pot is nearly full in the usual way, and then place 
a trellis, or neat sticks, in any fanciful way you like, 
and a couple of feet or rather more above the pot, 
training the delicate shoots all over the supports. 
Like all of us they delight in getting up in the world 
as fast as they can, and if you indulge them that way 
the bottom of the trellis will be naked, therefore the 
best way is to train them from the beginning back¬ 
wards and forwards at the bottom, and if they do not 
make side shoots after this bending, nip oft’ the very 
point; and you may go on nipping them occasionally 
till the end of February, unless they make enough 
of side shoots to fill up the trellis. If the shoots are 
first laid at three inches apart regularly, that would 
be a good distance, and the after shoots may be laid 
across these like fancy network: in short, you may do 
anything with them in the way of training. A pot 
on each side a window, and the shoots trained up to 
strings and across the top, would look remarkably well, 
and when the flowers came you cannot understand, 
from any description of mine, how rich and beautiful 
the fringe would look. 
There are many other kinds of tropoeolums, but 
this is the prettiest of them all. The Canary-bird 
plant is an annual tropoeolum. The real English 
name of all the tropoeolums is Indian cress, because 
their leaves taste like cress ; and the meaning of tro- 
poeolum is a trophy, as it must have been a great 
