THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, Octobuk 25, 1859. 
48 
But all Horseshoes are not equally hardy : none but. those 
which claim affinity to one or other of the “ accidental 
seedlings ” from the original, mentioned by Miller, is j 
one whit hardier than the Cape Scarlet was, or its repre¬ 
sentatives are at the present day. The pollen carries the 
leaf in all the sections of the Scarlet Geranium without 
a lapse in a thousand crosses. Cross Tom Thumb with 
the pollen of any Horseshoe kind, and all the seedlings 
from Tom will be horseshoed ; but cross Baron Hug el — 
the best marked Horseshoe we have—with the pollen of 
Tom Thumb, and the seedlings come nearly plain-leaved j 
at the first turn of the cross, and completely so in a second | 
generation; so that the horseshoe mark is not the cause i 
of the hardiness, and never was. The constitution of the 
fir9t Horseshoe Geranium happened to be so much more 
hardy than the constitution of the original plain-leaved j 
kind, owing to some peculiarity of soil and climate, and 
that was all; and if the two kinds had been kept separate 
in their generations each kind would have thrown the 1 
greater number of its seedlings after its own hardihood, 
and we should have been sure that Horseshoe kinds \ 
would be easier to keep than plain-leaved kinds. 
The way I am now preparing to winter my own stock 
of about three thousand seedling Geraniums is a new way, 
founded on the best examples of my old practice. I have 
often told of the five thousand Punches which I used to | 
strike in a turf-pit, and keep there without removing the i 
whole winter, at Shrnbland Park ; that was the best, the 
simplest, and the cheapest way I ever tried, or saw 
done, and I had the plan put in motion at the Experi¬ 
mental Garden every winter for the last five years, where 
it is also found to be the easiest and the cheapest. 
There is a long range of a cold pit in which one and 
two-year-old plants are wintered without pots; every 
leaf is cut off, but not a fresh wound left in the shoots. 
All that is cut out is done a long time before they are 
planted for wintering. The bed under them is not quite 
three inches deep, and below that is a hard crust. In 
that thin bed all the roots are just covered, and no more. 
The whole, when finished, get one good watering from a 
rose, and seldom any more till the month of March. The 
lights are off every dry and fine day, and in frost the 
glass is covered with a single run of mats, and Ferns put 
over them, and they seldom lose two out of a hundred 
there. My new way is in front of my White Grapes, and, 
as luck would have it, I never said aught about them; 
they will be under glass in future, from the wintering of 
the Geraniums to the planting-out period, and without 
glass all the summer. The wall has my favourite west 
aspect—the best aspect in winter for man and beast, and 
for all half-hardy plants in our climate. The wall border 
for the Grapes is not much over four feet wide; but it 
is a raised border with a brick edging between it and the { 
path, the soil being level with the top of the bricks; a i 
one-inch-thick deal, nine inches deep, in the rough—that 
is, not planed, but pitched or tarred—runs on the top 
of the hrick edging, for the “front wall;” and the wall 
for the Grapes is my back wall; the lights are hooked on 
to the back wall, and rest on the nine-inch board, with 
a handle at the bottom of each. Each light is fixed, as 
it were, at two inches from the next to it, on Sir Joseph 
Paxton’s plan of ventilating his new, cheap houses, and 
there is a coping of half-inch deal to shut up the opening 
in rainy and frosty weather, but not for an hour at other 
times ; two inches of constant ventilation day and night 
at each interval between light and light, and no cold 
current after all. This way of ventilating does away with 
currents of air altogether. 
The way the lights are hooked to the wall is by hook- ; 
and-eye—a hook screwed to each top corner of the light, ! 
and the eyes are fixed in a rail of two inches wide and j 
an inch and a half in thickness, which is fastened to the ! 
wall with screws and plugs ; a plug of wood let into the 
wall here and there, and the rail screwed to the plugs, so 
that the whole may he removed in May, and the Vines let 
up to be trained and trimmed as before. There is a little 
bit of coping over the rail and ends of the lights.jmd the 
ventilators’ copings, between the lights, fasten by one 
end in a groove in the back rail, and the other end 
dropping on a. wooden pin, which fits a hole at the end of 
a cap. Hothing could be more simple, more safe, or more 
economical, under the circumstances. One can keep out 
the hardest frost we ever had by covering, and that is 
all my force, and all the better ; for the border is alive 
with Cyclamens and half-hardy bulbs, and the Geraniums 
are stripped of every leaf, and planted out of the pots, 
and as close together as they will stand. Some few of 
my best breeders are planted out “ for good,” at the 
proper distances, and then the spaces between them are 
filled in with younger or smaller plants. Of course I 
shall have no watering to do to them for the next three 
or four months ; all they will need is a look over now and 
then, to look after damp spots or decayed leaves, after 
the new ones come. When there is a run of fine days, 
or a fall of mild coming rain, all the lights can be un¬ 
hooked faster than giving them air on the common cold- 
pit system, and there is not one-tenth of the wear and 
tear as in common frames and pits. 
How, with glass-lights at hand, that is the cheapest way 
to keep Calceolarias, Verbenas, and all kinds of bedding 
Geraniums in the winter. A temporary pit, so made, 
across the end of a dwelling-house opposite a fireplace, 
would keep warm enough, if the pit were six or eight feet 
wide, and as long as from corner to corner of that end of 
the house. My job is not quite finished yet; it is in the 
hands of our first hothouse builder in Kingston, as I 
always maintained that the cheapest waj r , in the long run, 
is to go to the first man in the line one is on. The first 
inns in all the great towns, in the time of the coach-and- 
four, were always the best; and where are better than the 
railway hotels of the present time P 
My border pit is only yet partly planted, the oldest and 
tallest plants at the back ; the rest according to their sizes 
will follow; the minimums and younger seedlings will 
occupy the front rows. The minimums which I first 
mentioned from the Crystal Palace, consist of occasional 
sports from seedlings ; they are the dwarfest of the race, 
or the smallest, as the word minimum denotes. 
That old variegated Geranium Handy, is still the 
favourite minimum at the Crystal Palace, where it is 
used, plant for plant, with the small blue Lobelias, which 
make charming pincushion-beds ; but we shall soon have 
a sufficient number of minimums to allow of whole beds 
being made of them, of different colours, and for edging 
beds of other colours. The ladies have taken to them at 
first sight, and they are then sure to prosper and become 
fashionable. There are plain-leaved and Horseshoe-leaved 
minimums, but, as yet, Handy is the only variegated. 
If Harlcatcay would sport into a variegated form, it 
would be certainly a minimum, as all these variegated 
sports come so much more dwarf than the parent kind. 
Handy never blooms, or blooms but very seldom indeed, 
and the bloom is in the shape of a star—a stellate ; but 
most of the new minimums flower as freely as Tom Thumb, 
and there is no gauge for their flowers. They may be of 
the common forms, as those of Tom Thumb, Punch, and 
Cense Unique; of Comp actum shape, as those of Frost's 
Old Compactum with globular trusses ; or Nosegay shape, 
having the three front petals wide apart from the two 
back ones ; or, like Handy, having a star-like shape, and 
very narrow or very broad petals. So that these mini¬ 
mums include the flowers of all the other sections indis¬ 
criminately, and leave but one more section to be de¬ 
scribed. That section is also rather new, with the trusses 
as large as those of Punch, Compact-urn, or Cerise Unique, 
and of all the shades of colours. Like them, the back 
and front petals are all of the same size, thus differing 
from all the rest, or old ones, and their shape is star-like^ 
after which they are named Stellates or Stellatums. 
Stella is the name by which the first of these fashionably- 
