283 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COX 
In this latitude Mr. Boynton has never found it necessary to 
keep these barrels of fruit in any place warmer than an open 
shed. It would be advisable, of course, everywhere to keep them 
in as cool a place as possible. In the spring they are to be 
removed to a cool, airy cellar, to an apartment especially for 
fruit, in connection with the ice-house .—(American Homestead .) 
ROSES. 
It is too soon yet to write about Roses in reference to 
the hard frost of this winter. The 1st of April will be 
quite early enough for all practical purposes to fix on 
the extent and the damage that Roses sustained by the 
frost, to register the kinds which are seemingly the 
most tender, and to ascertain how far Bourbons, Teas, 
and Noisettes, have been hardened for the last twenty 
years by the accession of new seedlings. The January 
of 1841 being the last great destroyer before the winter 
of 1860-1. But the season, or summer, before 1841 was 
the very reverse of last summer as respects the growth 
and the ripening of the young wood of tender Roses 
and all other such plants, so that Tea and other Roses 
which stood out the frost of 1840-1, must have been more 
severely punished by the late frost, as their young wood 
was neither nearly as well ripened as it was in 1841, 
nor the shoots so devoid of sap, which is almost, if 
not altogether, equivalent to unripe wood or half-ripened 
wood. 
The wood of all trees and bushes in this climate was 
never in our experience so well matured, and, to all ap¬ 
pearance, so well able to resist a hard winter as it was at 
the beginning of October, 1859. Yet, before the end of 
the month the young wood of many Peach trees received 
such a frost shock as is not within our memory to record, 
and from which they never recovered; while other Peach 
trees in colder situations escaped that early frost and 
the frosts of the following winter. If the frost of the 
17th October, 1859, had come on the 17th of August of 
that year, it would not have so much injured Roses and 
Peach trees at least—and that is a curious thing when you 
come to give it a thought, with a view of comparing the 
one season with the other. 
At the beginning and at the end of last October on 
the other hand, Tea or tender Roses and Peach trees 
were never in a worse condition to resist a severe or 
sudden frost. The wood was full of sap and not half 
ripe. Twelve months before then the wood was more 
ripe than such wood ever was in our days; but it was 
full of unripe sap, or watery sap, nevertheless, from the 
heavy rains of the previous September. So that, in 
practice, all our means of ripening the young growth of 
tender plants goes for nothing—absolutely nothing, if we 
have not the means of keeping out of their system or 
circulation any sudden or heavy fall of rain which may 
happen after the autumnal or equinoctial gales. The 
lesson which has been taught us by the two last autumns 
in their extremes points to that conclusion, and to none 
other. 
You may grow a suckling in an orchard-house from 
March to September, so that the suckling is as ripe as 
a new-laid egg, and the season’s wood as hard as a hoof 
or horn; but if you allow the healthy and greedy suck 
of the roots to exercise itself afresh, in September or 
even in October, by turning out the plants under heavy 
rains at the tail of the autumn, and after that you are 
compelled to leave them to the chances of the weather 
for that winter, depend upon it that all your in-door 
work, all this ripening of the young succulent wood, or 
such ripening as forced itself on all our stock in the 
summer of 1859, goes for nothing if we cannot keep the 
plants under cover for the winter, or else be able to keep 
the wet from getting so freely into their system after 
they are once ripe. 
That is not a sudden thought thrust on one after the 
fact. I saw it last October, as certainly as I shall hear of 
tfTRY GENTLEMAN, Eebbuaby 12, 1861. 
it now, and I took measures to counteract the influence 
of a hard winter, although I did not expect even frost 
over 5° till after the middle of January, and not a very 
hard one then. Still, remembering October, 1859, and 
not knowing but the like might be on me earlier than 
ever, I saved my young Roses, all young from one and 
two-year-old cuttings, and of all sorts and kinds on to 
the number of about four hundred plants, from the 
influence of the then heavy rains and the pouring 
torrents of the last six months, and came out of the 
experiment, I believe, without the loss of a single 
plant, and scores of mine are not so strong-looking as 
my pen-holder. Some few among the very weak Tea 
Roses seem scathed as by fire, but the bark and the 
buds are safe and sound. 
The means I adopted to save my Roses, I also put in 
practice with other sorts which are much nearer my 
heart than even Roses, and with just the same result—- 
very little damage from frost. The means were a 
complete stopping of the sucking powers of the roots. 
After I did it, not one of the numerous, healthy, and 
very fibrous roots could suck another drop from the 
earth for that autumn, and the leaves were green as ever, 
sucking in their turn from the vessels of the stems and 
shoots, putting me in mind of what Sir Wm. Middleton 
used to tell me at times, “ If you make me bleed at 
every pore I shall soon run dry.” Now the workings 
of the leaves in that dull, mild, and rainy October, 
caused the pores to bleed as freely as if they were fed 
from below ; and the consequence was, they, the pores, 
soon ran dry, and the young wood in effect was in the 
same condition as you might expect it to be from a hot 
summer, or, ii you can apprehend it, like a man dying 
of hunger in the midst of plenty. That means, most 
certainly, had saved many kinds of my Roses from de¬ 
struction, and all of them from more or less damage ; 
and, as a matter of course, the same means would have 
saved every Rose of the same kind which the frost of last 
winter had killed above the zero of our scales ; for with 
me the frost was barely down to zero, and that only on 
two nights, but at the time the earth was bare as my loof 
or the palm of my hand, which in other parts were deep 
in snow—the safest covering of Nature against severe 
cold. 
In the second week in October I took up every one of 
my Roses and other plants from cuttings during the two 
previous years. I docked in the roots considerably ; but, 
contrary to what I often preached in respect to Roses, I 
did not cut off a shoot or leaf from any one kind, and 
very few of the leaves flagged at all, and many on the 
Hybrid Perpetuals are quite green now, none of the tops 
being yet pruned. That was an exceptional season, and 
this is exceptional in my practice to meet it as far a3 
possible. With me, and with my mode of having all 
Roses on their own roots, there must be some numbers 
of very small plants just rooted among them every 
autumn. My practice and my preaching go to prove 
and to advise the use and necessity of pruning all young 
and weak Roses, no matter to what section they belong, 
just at the end of September or early in October; and 
the natural reason for such early cuttings is in order that 
the sacking of the roots for the rest of the autumn should 
not be spread up among extended branches, or the sucking 
be very strong on account of a good outlet to let it run 
its upward tendency—but be slow and sure on a much 
smaller scale, and be confined to a few buds near to the 
surface of the ground. 
The slower the suction of the roots is in the latter part 
of the autumn, the more sure the sap is, or the more 
near to ripe it is in its nature, and, therefore, the more 
manhood strength, so to speak, it gives to the buds 
which will be run up into the next season’s growth, and 
then the stronger the shoots will be in consequence, 
and the sooner a young plant gets up to its prime. 
The same rule of nature applies to the young Oak as 
