191 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, January 1, 1861. 
inches deep. In making the bed, take care to tread or beat it 
firm. As soon as the bed shall have risen and declined to 75° it 
is ready to spawn. I find Cutbush’s Milltrack to be the best 
spawn I can procure. Half a bushel will spawn a bed ten feet 
square. This broken in pieces the size of small Apples, placed 
just in the dung and covered two inches deep, in any garden 
soil well beaten down, will produce abundance of Mushrooms in 
six or seven weeks, in a temperature of from 50° to 55°. 
A bed thus treated, 12 feet by 7, spawned with half a bushel 
of spawn obtained from Messrs. Cutbush, of Highgate, lias 
produced me above 80 lbs. weight of Mushrooms of first-rate 
quality, many not thoroughly open weighing four ounces each. 
The bed is now in full bearing, and has been since the 7th of 
October, and likely to produce at least half as many more with 
no further care than above enumerated, with the exception of an 
occasional watering when dry.— W. Young, Gardener to R. 
Barclay, Esq., West Hill House, Highgate. 
PAMPAS GRASS. 
A iSrant of this Grass of the large-leaved sort has this year 
produced only eighteen flower-stems. They are eleven feet high 
and are in a fine state. This plant stands in the centre of a 
grass plat, having an excellent situation, and abundance of room 
for its roots to extend, is in good soil, and was lightly manured. 
The stems are upright, stiff, and formal. Another plant of the 
small-leaved variety has eighty-two flower-stems. The tallest 
flower-stem is nine feet high. The plant is a perfect picture, and 
the leaves stand only five feet high, turning over in the most 
graceful manner. The stems spring off in a very easy and 
effective manner. Some are only six feet high. This plant is in 
a very rich soil, had a great deal of the strongest manure and 
horse water last winter, and I think the result shows that a 
recent writer is wrong in recommending it as a plant that 
should not be strongly manured. It is to the absence of strong 
stimulating manures that I have attributed the indifferent 
specimens which may be seen at Kew and elsewhere. They 
flower well once, and then, generally, badly afterwards. My 
plants are several years old, and were very handsome in 1858-59. 
The tall-growing male plant is less suitable than the smaller- 
growing female plant for gardens. The former has a coarse, 
rigid look ; the latter is less liable to injury from high winds, 
and is far more graceful in its habit. The flowers are different, 
but to my taste the female is the prettier of the two.— Bellieium, 
Hoyle, Cornwall. 
THE CONSTRUCTION OF ORCHARD-HOUSES. 
Mr. Pearson’s remarks on these structures are in the proper 
spirit, and lead one to think of the best and cheapest mode of 
erecting them. The question cannot be too much agitated ; for 
houses devoted to fruit-tree culture must, in the course of a very 
few years, have a great influence on the production of choice 
fruit, and make what for so many years was a luxury confined to 
the few almost a necessary to the many. 
I must correct one or two errors into which Mr. Pearson has 
fallen. I did not commence with lean-to houses with a hedge 
for a back wall; these were an afterthought, built against some 
fine Beech hedges for the purpose of retarding the ripening of 
fruit, and of growing in them Apricots, Poach, and Nectarine 
trees for sale. I have five of them still in existence, and most 
convenient places they are. My first orchard-house was a lean- 
to, a fixed roof, with boards (covered with asphalte felt) for walls, 
and ventilated front and back with sliding shutters. I remem¬ 
ber feeling full of doubt about this mode of ventilation; for 
every vinery and greenhouse I had seen was built with the usual 
heavy rafters and sliding lights “ to give air.” This house, now 
about fifteen years old, was built with Larch poles for posts ; 
for, was not the fixed roof an experiment, and might it not fail ? 
So I reasoned. It has never failed, and the Larch posts having 
recently been cut off at their lower ends where they were de¬ 
cayed, and placed on a sill resting on brickwork, it is now in 
excellent condition. It was in this house that I commenced the 
orchard-house culture of Peaches and Nectarines by planting 
two rows of trees—one in the back border, and the other in the 
front, with a sunken path between them, suffering them to grow 
one season, and building the house over them in the autumn. 
They had then formed themselves by their summer’s growth 
into nicely-shaped bushes; and I can now vividly recollect the 
pleasure they gave me in spring when covered with their beau¬ 
tiful flowers—every petal perfect, owing to the favourable climate 
of this my first glass-roofed shed. Let me add my firm hope 
that m my a humble gardener, poor in pocket but rich in (garden¬ 
ing) spirit, will yet derive equal satisfaction from a humble 
lean-to house, “ horridly ugly,” as our friend Pearson thinks 
such a structure. 
I am well acquainted with his passion for “ brickwork laid in 
Portland cementhe is in the same category as the “ hothouse 
builders,” who seem to think that no glazed structure can be 
perfect without brickwork, heavy rafters, and sliding sashes. 
Like them, Mr. Pearson must have imbibed his love for them 
(as far as brickwork goes) with his mother’s milk ; a large por¬ 
tion of the brain region of most of our hothouse builders must 
be occupied with brickwork, so necessary do they think it to the 
well-building of a glazed structure. No one can admire more 
than I do the beautiful houses erected by our first-class hot¬ 
house builders—they are in many instances an ornament to the 
country; but I wish to wean them from the idea that sliding 
sashes and strong brickwork are alicays necessanj; far from it. 
We shall in a very short time Bee men shaking off the trammels 
of “ old times,” and building orchard-houses light, cheap, and 
durable, without my friend Pearson’s dearly-loved brickwork 
and Portland cement. 
My present idea is, that for a large orchard-house there is no 
form comparable to the single span with a fixed roof and large 
glass, 20 inches square or so. A house of this kind from 20 feet 
to 30 feet wide, the roof supported by light iron pillars, and its 
sides by posts either of wood or iron, without any brickwork, 
will be ultimately the house for all large gardens. The un¬ 
broken roof—for there is no occasion for any roof ventilation— 
and the large space inside is so grateful, for in most glass houses 
there is a sense of confinement not at all agreeable. The most 
startling point to all hothouse builders is the absence of roof 
ventilation; for in a house of this kind there is one large un¬ 
broken glass surface without slides, pullies, ridges, furrows, or 
any other expensive paraphernalia. All the ventilation is what 
for the future we may call lateral—viz., for a house 20 feet to 
25 feet wide a shutter on hinges, or sashes on pivots, on each 
side, 18 inches deep, 2 feet from the surface of the ground ; for 
a house 30 feet wide the same kind of ventilators on each side 
a little larger— say 2 feet in depth and 18 inches from the sur¬ 
face. These openings in hot weather admit two large lateral 
streams of cool air, which, as far as I have at present observed, 
meet nearly in the centre of my twenty-four-feet-wicle house; 
rarefaction takes place rapidly, the two currents of air unite, 
form a large body of heated air, which ascends to the top of the 
house, and finds egress by the aperture left at each end under 
the apex of the roof. This method of ventilation, although so 
simple, is quite perfect. 
The contrast of these large single span-roofed houses with 
ridge-and-furrow houses is great, so dim and dull are the latter 
in comparison. When very large spaces of ground are to be 
covered with glass—as with the Crystal Palace and the large 
conservatory at Cliatsworth—ridge-and-furrow houses are neces¬ 
sary ; but for fruit growing, and agreeable houses to be used as 
sanatoriums, they are expensive—far beyond the single span- 
roof—and unsightly; those who have been tempted to build 
them for fruit growing will in a few years feel surprised that 
they could even have been tempted by the fashion of imitation, 
to have thus committed themselves. 
My beau ideal of an orchard-house—to be used not only for fruit 
growing, but as a sanatorium and charming promenade in spring, 
autumn, and winter—is a single span-roof house, glazed with glass 
20 inches square, 30 feet wide, 13 feet high, and from 100 feet to 
500 fo.'t long, its roof supported inside by light iron pillars, its sides 
by light posts, either of wood or iron, ventilated laterally either by 
a shutter on hinges, glazed, or by sashes on pivots. Instead of 
boards below the ventilating shutter or sashes I would have 
slabs of 32-oz. glass, and in like manner glass at each end “ from 
head to foot ”—not a brick to be seen. A house built after this 
manner would be lighter than the day, and make the owner of 
it forget that bricks, Portland cement, huge “ principals ” for 
rafters, pullies, and sliding lights, ever could be thought of in 
building a house intended for enjoyment. In damp, hot vaults, 
intended to grow oreliideous plants in, and to kill the growers, 
such things are, I suppose, necessary ; but our climate requires 
no moisture to be added to it—quite the contrary. We lack 
dryness and warmth, and with the former in taking exercise it is 
[ surprising‘how little'we require of the latter. A long promenade 
