317 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, August 30, 1859. 
stud-blooms — that is, like the shoulder of a bunch of 
Grapes taken off in bloom-bud; the blossoms are a little 
bigger than in the Grape Vine, but they are of exquisite 
and very peculiarly sweet scent, like some of the finer 
scents of the perfumers, in the evening. Mr. Thomson 
sent our plant, a fresh-rooted cutting, in a letter, and it 
has run about one of my experimental Vines “ like wild¬ 
fire but a dirty-brown grub, which comes out at night, 
and gets just within the surface of the soil by day, has 
cut it right through at the collar; and, unless it come 
from the roots, I am as bad off as Jonah was, and I 
must never be without it, as, of all the soft-wooded 
climbers, it is the most lady-like in all its ways. 
Among other novelties was a bed of a new Nuttallia, a 
genus that is little known. The old Nuttallia grandiflorci 
is one of the best old border plants, and one of the most 
difficult to keep ; but this will be an easy thing, as it 
seeds freely, and is not more than a biennial. The plants 
were a yard high, very branchy, and full of blooms— 
violet and crimson colour, with a white bottom. If the 
flowers of Chironia frutescens were cupped, and dashed 
with a tinge of purple, they would give some idea of this 
beautiful thing ; but it will be best to prove it in patches, 
like patches of Coreopsis. 
There is a blue Clematis here, which is as sweet as the 
common white Clematis and quite as flowery : and as I 
had a mind for a long time to tell of a way I once proved 
very much like the right ari’angement for a rustic basket, 
and as I see I must put off' a general report of this nursery 
for another week, I shall here explain what I mean while 
the iron is hot. This rustic bed is to be the largest of them 
all. It may be a circle or not, according to the situation 
or the faucy. Ten feet in diameter is the smallest size, 
and thirty feet through a comfortable bed. The edging 
must rise one inch above ten inches for every foot the 
bed is over ten feet through : the edge for a twenty-feet 
bed would thus be twenty inches high. All those edgings 
to be of rubble-work and Ivy—that is, loose stones or 
loose brickbats, bedded in the soil of the bed, and covered 
outside with Ivy. Let us say a twenty-feet-through bed, 
to hide something, or to draw the attention of a stranger 
from something else. The edging in Ivy twenty inches, 
or a little more or less high; but the soil inside the Ivy 
not to be so high as the edging by nine or ten inches, but 
the centre of the bed to rise twenty inches higher than 
the top of the Ivy. Just inside the Ivy have a platform 
of open rustic work just two feet across; drive down 
stumps, and nail small rods to them under this platform ; 
and in the centre of it plant young healthy plants of this 
newish sweet-scented blue Clematis at four feet apart— 
Clematis azurea odorata; take up their heads between 
the rods, and train them all over the platform as thick as 
the Ivy is on the side-edging; and the more the young 
shoots are stopped the first year the more numerous they 
will be; and the more they are pruned back in winter, 
and stopped till the end of May, the more bloom they 
will give in the autumn; and the more bloom the more 
scent. After a while the rustic frame goes to the dogs, 
like all rustic work ; but by that time there will be such 
a “ hassock ” made with the interlacing shoots of the 
Clematis, that nothing could displace so cleverly as a 
battle-axe. But battle-axes are only seen in museums 
with us ; therefore the chances are that this ring of Cle¬ 
matis, now nearly three feet across, will last without any 
more support as long as the Ivy will. The centre of the 
flowers of Clematis ecerulea odorata are as white with 
stamens as those of the white Clematis itself; therefore 
a mixture of blue and white will admit almost any of the 
bedding plants; and the centre of the bed or circle, say 
a space of fourteen or fifteen feet in diameter, is to be 
planted on the common plan. It was the old white Cle¬ 
matis that I used for this basket-bed ; and all the middle 
was one kind of scarlet Geranium. It was on a square 
piece of ground ; and there were four little circles, one in 
each corner, and a white Clematis in each, and a pole 
stuck in the centre of the bed, the top of it being ten 
feet Irom the Geraniums. The four Clematises from the 
four corners rose seven feet on stakes, and then festooned 
over to the centre pole. I), Beaton. 
FRAGMENTS. 
BONAPAETEA JUNCEA. 
This beautiful Rush-like plant, known also as Agave 
gemnifiora, and Littcea gemnifiora, has for some time been 
a striking object at Luton Hoo. The tapering fishing- 
rod-like flower-stem last week was above twelve feet in 
height, producing hundreds of its green-tinted-with- 
yellow flowers, while on the lower part of the stem the 
seed-pods or capsules showed signs of swelling and per¬ 
fecting the seed. Now that there is a growing interest 
tor fine foliage, this plant may become more common. 
Few things could look more graceful in a vase, with its 
Rush-like foliage forming a cone in the centre, and the 
lower leaves or branches hanging down gracefully to the 
base of the vase. This elegance in the foliage must ever 
be the principal attraction, as, hitherto, the plant has 
flowered but rarely. It was introduced from Peru in 
the beginning of the present century, and Mr. Fraser 
thinks that the present plant can be little less than fifty 
years old. He has known but little difference it its ap¬ 
pearance, as respects health and luxuriance, for twenty 
years. Until it flowered I perceived no difference in 
its appearance for six years at least. It has ail along, 
I believe, been treated as a greenhouse plant. Whether 
by growing more freely at certain periods—in other words 
being treated as a tropical plant at one time, and allowed 
a season of comparative rest at another, it might be made 
to bloom and fruit somewhat regularly, previous ex¬ 
perience does not allow us to determine. If such a thing 
could be done, it would make a fine neighbour for gi¬ 
gantic plants of the lilium giganteum. At present we 
must value it chiefly for its very graceful foliage, and as 
a nice contrast to fine plants of green and variegated 
Agaves, to which section of the Amaryllids it is most 
closely allied. During the summer months we believe it 
would be quite as much at home as the American Aloe 
out of doors. I am not well up in the history of the plant 
blooming in this country. A plant with a flower-spike of 
much the same height flowered with Mr. Knight, at the 
Exotic Nursery, King’s Road, Chelsea, London, in the 
winter of 1826. 
On the Continent the plant several times has thrown 
up a spike of about double that height. One plant is 
spoken of as having flowered twice. Whether that took 
place in the identical plant, or from a sucker from the 
original, grown upon the Hamiltonian system in Pine 
j culture, we are left in doubt. We know that in the Agave 
the same plant flowers but once, though, no doubt, the 
suckers thinned out would receive much strength from 
j the old stem and leaves. After all, at present the most 
graceful foliage of the plant presents its chief attraction— 
! an attraction which has not been prized at all in pro¬ 
portion to its beauty, if we judge from the comparative 
! rarity with which the plant is met. In advanced styles 
■ of artistic gardening its presence would be very telling. 
POETULACCAS SPOETING. 
Instances have been already given of the comparative 
hardiness of seeds over plants, in the fact that seeds of 
| these have come up in the open ground, self-sown, more 
thickly than if the ground had been daubed with Spergula 
pilifera. When the different varieties, however, are near 
to each other, it is next to impossible to keep the varieties 
true to colour. Last season, two borders of these at 
Luton Hoo were among the finest sights a lover of colour 
could witness on a sunny day. There were six or seven 
j distinct colours in as many different broad runs. The 
I seeds were saved from the most distinct colours of each 
