THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN’S COMPANION, May 26, 1857. 
any precise amount of heat, or, indeed, any of those 
little collateral matters which are, as it were, subsidiary 
to high culture, and recommend that a due attention be 
paid to the potting-shed and the conservation of soils. 
R. EltRINGTON. 
SPRING FLOWERS. 
This spring every bed and border in the Experi¬ 
mental Garden, all the vases, the rustic baskets, the 
Ivy baskets, and the front of the shrubberies, where 
they could be seen from the windows, were filled with 
spring flowers, every one of which was planted or trans 
planted since February, and all of them will be removed 
ere long to make room for the summer flowers. The last 
of them will be the rare double Crowsfoot, the very 
finest thing that ever was planted for a mass, and for 
the revival of which we are indebted to the Honourable 
Lady Oust, who met with it somewhere about North 
Wales, and had it brought into the garden at Masleuch 
Castle, below Chester, whence her ladyship sent it to 
one of the royal gardens, where I saw it last May, and 
from which I had runners of it in October. They were 
then planted in a rich piece of ground in the kitchen 
garden, and in February were planted out in the vases 
and in two small beds with Wallflowers, where they now 
carpet the bottom, and seem all the better for being 
partially shaded by the “Walls.” We did not pull up 
the Wallflowers for fear of disturbing these darlings; 
but as soon as they were over, or nearly so, they were cut 
off close to the ground, which is the best way to dispose 
of them whenever they are mixed with other spring 
plants, as in this instance. I had my doubts all along 
about the runners of the Crowsfoot flowering the first 
season, but now they are blooming and throwing up for 
bloom beautifully; not, however, so strongly or so 
thickly as the old plants which produced them. Still 
we shall have a good “tasting” of them the first year, 
and after that we shall hold up our heads as high as any 
of the royal gardeners themselves. 
All the old gardens about Surbiton are well supplied 
with Aubrietia purpurea in patches of from six to six- 
and-twenty inches across, and it looks as if this was its 
native place. It is the finest of our spring flowers to 
hang down from the edges of a rustic basket, and that is 
the way we grow it. This is about the best time to make 
cuttings of it for a stock for next year, and that is the 
best way to increase it, as it does not part very well at 
the roots, neither does it like to be often disturbed, and 
it is a most difficult thing to establish where the soil is 
not quite suitable for it. Cuttings of it will root in heat 
or cold. 
The golden-variegated Ground Ivy ( Glechoma hederacea 
variegata ) is another most beautiful plant to hang down 
from the edges of a basket in the spring alternately 
with the Aubrietia, as we have it just now; and we 
hardly know which to admire most, the golden streamers 
of the Ground Ivy without flowers, or the profusion of 
violet or. light bluish purple flowers of Aubrietia. In 
the spring the golden colour of the variegated Ground 
Ivy is intensely rich, but in summer it loses much of 
that, and is then not so likely to catch the eye. Hence 
the reason why the world is not full of it; therefore 
book it for a spring flower, and say no more about it 
till this time next year. 
W ho could sleep half the time without a long row of 
Eschsclioltzia after once seeing it that way ? Ours last 
year was, if anything, too much of a good thing. The 
border was new and newly trenched, and, being destined 
for a collection of annuals, a good heavy dressing of 
rotten dung was worked in. The grand secret for having 
a super-excellent show of annuals is to sow them thickly ; 
to thin them out in time; to give them ample room 
plant from plant, and still more room at the roots by 
trenching or very deep stirring with a three or four¬ 
pronged fork if they are among herbaceous plants, which 
it would be daft to disturb with a spade; and to have the 
contents of some muck pie or another worked in as deep 
as the fork can go, unless one can get the real stable 
manure from an old hotbed, that would cut down like 
fresh butter. 
I very seldom cover annual seeds at all, and I know 
it is wrong to do so after the middle of April—very 
wrong indeed. There is no gardener in the kingdom 
who is fonder of annuals, or who has used more of them 
“all his life” than I have, and I shall never believe 
that a garden is half furnished without lots and lots of 
them; therefore I ought to know all about them, and I 
say distinctly that their seeds ought not to be covered, 
in the sense in which we understand covering seeds. 
When light soil is well Rug by a handy workman, who 
will level the surface and break every clod as he goes, 
it is just in the best possible condition to sow the bulk 
of annuals; then sow on the surface, and a light stroke 
or two with a fine rake buries or covers them quite deep 
enough—I more often do it with my fingers. Sweet 
Peas and Lupines, with Nasturtiums and a few more 
such, are covered just as deep as garden Peas for the 
kitchen—no more or less; and of course shallow rows 
or drills are made for them on purpose. 
The maddest thing a man ever did, or the most foolish 
thing a woman ever thought of, was to sow annuals in 
spring on poor land, or on rich soil only scratched on 
the surface as an apology for digging, allowing them to 
stand as thickly as they came up, and then expecting 
them to be worth looking at. Always sow thickly to 
guard against failures, and if you sow before the 10th of 
April let the rake go a little deeper, so that every seed is 
covered, and no more. The reason for this is, that a few 
warm days and dewy nights may stimulate the seeds 
to sprout prematurely, when many of the seedlings will 
not bear the frost; but, as was said in another column 
lately, spring frost does no harm to any one seed I know 
as long as it is merely a seed, an extremely curious fact 
which I have seen proved, to decide a bet, as long ago 
as 1822—the year before or the year after, I forget 
which, but the year I speak of was the next to the 
mildest winter I recollect. About that winter the Currant 
bushes were in full bloom by the middle of February 
north of Inverness, in Lord Lovat’s garden at Beaufort 
Castle. There was an idea prevalent at that period 
that exotic plants could be acclimatised by successively 
rearing them from seeds in a succession of latitudes; as, 
for instance, seeds from Algiers to be sown in the south 
of Italy, the seeds saved from that crop to be sown a few 
degrees northward, and so on to the north of Scotland. 
Such as opposed this doctrine in the north were called 
Jacobites, and one of these Jacobites laid a bet that he 
could prove that all seeds by an original decree could 
withstand any degree of cold incident to this globe, pro¬ 
vided they were perfectly dry at the approach of the cold, 
and his proof was with packets of Melon and Cucumber 
seeds, which were exposed to the frost of the winter- 
succeeding the mild one. Every one of the seeds grew, 
and whether there was any trick in the thing I dinna 
ken; but it would be very well worth while to try that 
experiment over again. I can vouch for one thing 
which happened through my own neglect: seeds from 
Cumana, which Humboldt says is the hottest place on 
the face of this globe, were left “ overnight” in a pot¬ 
ting-shed where water was iced very hard, and yet most 
oi them vegetated, although they must have endured 
several degrees of frost. 
All this refers only to spring-sown annuals, and the 
very opposite treatment is necessary for those that are 
sown in August and September; the ground for them 
can hardly be too poor, and if it is stirred two inches 
