TII.K 
COTTAGE GAKOKM KJl AND. CuU.Yi’LY. GENTLEMAN, Uctoueb 20. 
upon and discussed before the question of theory against 
practice, or practice against theory, can be finally 
settled. 
The most singular thing I ever read or heard of about 
Vines is a statement by Mr. Fish two or three weeks 
since. It is to the effect that he grafted or inarched—for 
I have not got that number by me just now—a Muscat 
Vine on a common or non-Muscat-flavoured kind, and 
that the common Vine made a shoot below the Muscat 
scion, and that this common-kind shoot produced com¬ 
mon Grapes which were of a Muscat flavour if I under¬ 
stood him. Here, then, is a great mystery, which may 
easily be turned to good account, as it would seem that 
a graft of a Muscat Grape is capable of giving the 
Muscat flavour to the fruit of branches from the stock 
growing near it, or say under particular circumstances. 
Mr. Fish would do well to give us a chapter under this 
head, and give us his own opinion on the point un¬ 
reservedly. A first-rate Grape grower told me lately 
that he was going to turn a new leaf, and that he would 
keep “turning” until he produced a bunch heavier or 
as heavy as Speechly’s celebrated bunch at Welbeck, 
which bunch weighed nineteen pounds, and was sent 
somewhere on a pole carried by two men on their 
shoulders. My friend will send his bunch by two 
carriers in a similar way to London, so you see it is 
time for us old practitioners to brush up and square 
practice with theory, or else round off the corners of 
theory so as to fit it to our own practice. The rising 
generation cannot help benefiting by this move. 
The productive Esperione aforesaid was managed for 
many years very nearly to the way which was given by 
Mr. Hoare in his first treatise on the Vine—the best we 
have on outdoor Grapes. Mr. Hoare was a Surbiton 
author, for it was here he wrote his treatise, and if lie 
had stopped at the end of that treatise we should be 
quoting him as an authority; but he took wild notions 
and baseless theories on the Vine, which overturned his 
authority altogether. The Vine in question was planted 
in strong adhesive loam twenty inches deep, over a 
porous, dark red, “brasby” stone, the out-crossing of a 
fine natural rock, about twenty feet from the angle 
made by the east wall of the garden with that on 
the north side, or what is generally called the “south 
wall.” It was first “taken up” with two shoots, 
and these two were trained next year right and left 
along the bottom of the wall, the eyes being destroyed 
on the under side of these branches, and those on the 
upper side were reduced to nine inches the one from the 
other, and all the shoots from these were trained up 
perpendicularly to the top of the wall. At pruning 
time half the shoots on each side were cut down 
alternately to one bud from the parent horizontal shoot, 
and the other half of them were cut to five feet, or to half 
the height of the wall. These carried fruit next summer, 
and the cut down ones made shoots which reached the 
top of the wall, and the top eye of the five-feet shoots 
was allowed to make a shoot to the top of the wall also. 
All the shoots stood at, or nearly, nine inches apart, but 
the fruiting shoots were just double that distance apart. 
At the next pruning the long shoots from the bottom 
with no fruit on were cut back to five feet, and the 
bottom half of the five-feet shoots which had carried fruit 
that season were disbudded, the top half only being 
allowed to fruit; so that every alternate shoot fruited 
against the lower half of the wall, and every other shoot 
against the upper half. The two end shoots were brought 
down to the horizontal every winter to extend the tree, 
and they were cut according to their strength to get 
uprights from them. The one on the right could only 
extend twenty feet, owing to the aspect turning at the 
angle; but the left-hand shoot reached forty feet, and 
that made the Vine just sixty feet long and ten feet high. 
The spurs were stopped one, two, and three inches 
before the bunch; no eye was allowed to haveraore 
than one bunch, and all the bunches were well thinned. 
I know one other Vine which is thus managed now 
and does well; and I saw a long low wall of young Vines 
at Mr. Sturgeon’s which were to be treated in the same 
way ; but as they were many they would be more strictly 
on Hoare’s system. * If Mr. Sturgeon, jun., sees this I 
hope he will give us an account of his Vines and the 
crop of this season, and above all his novel way of pro¬ 
pagating the Vine for the open wall, a way winch I 
believe was never in print. D. Beaton. 
SHRUBLAND PARK. 
{Continued from page 20.) 
All this while we have kept our position about 
the mansion end of the central walk of the balcony 
garden; but now, lest our feet get cramped or fastened 
to the gravel, Mr. Foggo leads us onward to the north 
end of the garden, turns abruptly to the Tight, where the 
north end of the mansion is fringed with trees, fore¬ 
grounded with fine specimens of Laurestinus, and enters 
on a long broad walk called Brownlow terrace, with a 
table lawn and a magnificent row of Spanish Chestnuts 
covered with fruit on the right hand, several of the trunks 
of which I should judge were fully thirty feet in circum¬ 
ference near the ground, and showing what time and 
soil might do at Shrubland in the production of noble 
specimens of timber. On the left the ground undulates, 
curves, and deepens into the recesses of a valley, show¬ 
ing now and then a yard or two of walk through the 
trees with which the banks are covered, picturesquely 
among which fine Thorns are again conspicuous. 
Returning once more to the balcony garden, I pro¬ 
posed looking at it from the terrace; but Mr. Foggo 
said that by and by we would do so, and also ascend 
the tower, where the view would be more extended. 
Afterwards there was so much to see and talk about that 
we forgot all about the tower; but presently we pass 
through the temple in the balustrading, and Mr. Foggo’s 
reason was at once apparent. 
The worthy parish schoolmaster who, among other 
things, helped to give me a taste for reading, when 
describing some of the features of a new book would stop 
abruptly by saying, “ I must not anticipate.” Mr. Foggo 
would not thus weaken a first impression, and had I 
acted on the same principle the reader who accompanies 
me would not have known that the mansion and its 
balcony garden were placed on the verge of a preci¬ 
pitous bank until he passed through the magic threshold 
j of the temple; and what a sight, and what a contrast to 
what we have been looking at 1 
Right before you is a magnificent wide stone staircase 
of about 170 steps, divided into various flights or rests, 
and these rests wider than the steps, and furnished with 
vases of scarlet Geraniums. On each side of the stair¬ 
case the precipitous bank extends 400 or 500 yards, 
thinly scattered with deciduous trees, but densely clothed 
with an underground of Box, &c. Close to the sides of 
! the stone staircase is, or will be, a Box verge from top 
to bottom six feet wide, cut smooth to resemble an 
edging of turf. At the bottom of the staircase, and 
right along the bottom of the bank either way, is a wide 
i grass avenue or terrace, partaking of the line of the 
bank. 
In a direct line with the staircase is a beautiful circular 
basin some forty feet in diameter, with a massive stone 
kerb, and a jet in its centre, far enough from this grass 
terrace to permit of a circular band of turf some sixty 
feet in width, and a broad circular walk besides, all round 
it. Passing your eye over the centre of this fountain a 
broad glade takes you up to abeautiful colonnaded temple 
