49' 
THB COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN. October 25, 1859. 
shaped (lowers is to be ushered into the flower garden 
next spring. 
Our bedding Geraniums are now thus classed by the 
ladies — common, as Tom Thumb ; compact, as Com¬ 
paction ; nosegay, as T'othergillii stellate, as Stella,- 
and minimum, as Dandy ; and, as far as we know, these 
descriptive names will cover any seedling or any sport 
which is likely to appear in our day, unless it is a Poly- 
astrum. Fothergillu comes sometimes a Polyaster, as 
Mr. Kyles informed me this autumn at the Crystal 
Palace, which means that secondary trusses, or many 
stars come from one head or truss from among the flowers 
of the first truss. I had a most singular instance of this 
kind of sport this season. One truss, with sixty or seventy 
flowers in it, pushed up nineteen other secondary trusses 
from the first truss. The whole were hard upon 200 
flowers on one footstalk, as near as I could count. I 
thought of drying off the specimen for the Museum at 
Kew, but could not. and save seeds from it. Seeds of it 
I did save, but not many, and the flowers were so crowded 
that the rains destroyed more than the half of them 
before I could get a seed. If this old freak, in its new 
extension, should become hereditary, which I hardly 
expect, we must have one more section to include all such. 
Neither the Pomological Commissioner, nor Mr. Hender¬ 
son, nor others who have seen mine, among whom is a 
diligent observer, Mr. Fish, gardener to Lady Cullum, 
Hardwick, in Suffolk, had never seen the like, save one 
or two additionals to the truss of the original Nosegay, 
Folhergillii. 
The one extreme of keeping any and all of these 
sections during the winter, I take to be my own planting- 
out system, in a border-pit just described. The other 
end is, that by which two or three lorn Thumbs are saved 
by him of not so much as a square of glass, save in 
liis window's. His plan is to give “ suction ” the long 
lone winter, but no leaves or light. How he does it is 
this—he takes up his border Geraniums and cuts off all 
their leaves; he then lets them dry awhile in the tool- 
shed ; after that he takes them in of an evening, and ties 
three or four of them together just up above the collar 
of the plants, or say three or four inches up from the 
roots. The roots he manages to get round and round 
into a kind of long ball; but he mixes a little moss with 
the roundings, and covers the whole with moss in a dry 
state, and with pack thread he makes it tight enough for 
anything ; and, last of all, he puts the moss ball in a pail 
of warm foot-water, which w r as used for the bairns before 
they were put to bed, and leaves it there till the morrow, 
to make up for the previous week’s drying in the shed. 
In the morning he wrings most of the water from the 
moss, and ties the ball as tight as wax, in a piece of an 
old red leather apron, the cast-off of the under-butler at 
the “ Hallthen the plants and ball are rolled into 
another piece of old green baize, part of the lining of a 
plate-closet at the same Hall, and both ends are tied, and 
the top of the plants’ end is hung up on a nail, where no 
frost ever yet could reach. How often he looked at them 
that winter I really cannot say, as I had only the first 
part of his plan before my eye ; but I heard in the spring 
that nothing could be more successful. 
The plan was carried out in Suffolk; and I had almost 
forgotten it till the other day, when Mr. Wells, my old 
foreman of the pleasure-grounds there, came up to Lon¬ 
don and down to see me, and wondered how I could 
winter so many plants, when the moss-belling system was 
brought up in our mind’s eye. He is a natural genius, 
and invented a transplanting machine, which I cannot 
make out without drawings, but which will move a 
Portugal Laurel with a ton of earth, in midsummer, by 
the working of three men ; and a pump for liquid manure, 
to raise more gallons per minute than I can recollect 
just now. He also made his own pits for Melons and 
Cucumbers, and for keeping Geraniums by one and the 
same fire, witli extended flues. He is gardener to a 
clergyman, who lias one of the most conscientious gar¬ 
deners in the kingdom; but his time w as too short for 
me to get out of him one-half of his ideas of- keeping- 
plants over winter under difficulties. The worst plan, 
he says, is to put pots and plants, which stood out-of : 
doors a long while, up all at once into an upper-room 
in a house with only a window to air them, unless they , 
are looked over every other day. He says they are sure • 
to damp before the weather is dry enough, by frost, to- 
save them. He says, and I agree with that, the best 
way for plants in the upper-rooms, if they are merely- 
to be kept alive till the “ season comes round,” is that- 
on the suction system of keeping the roots between wet 
and dry, and the tops in a freely-ventilated room, and 
the best and simplest -way to do that by means of shallow 
boxes—say, not over six inches deep, nor over a foot 
wide; but as long as one can carry, or as long as you 
please, then out of beds, or out of pots, is all the same; 
but if in pots, to have the balls shaken off first, then - all 
the leaves removed without making wounds, to plant ^ 
them in dry, sandy earth, to shake the box earnestly., 
after the planting, so as to cast the dry soil in among the 
roots thoroughly—ail this to be done in an outhouse or 
shed, and then to put the box in the open air, and to 
water it as if it were midsummer-day ; also, to leave it. 
out for several days to drain well, or, if it be frost-like, 
to get it back into the shed; and so not to put it up 
stairs till the mould is half dried. A little moss, bran, or 
sawdust, is a good thing to put on the top of such boxes 
to allow of the room being thoroughly ventilated without' 
drying up the moisture in the boxes too rapidly, and then 
they seldom require more water till after the new year. 
But it is from the middle or end of January that the 
great bulk die from sheer dryness for want of water. 
The boxes, however, should be looked over occasionally 
all the time, and any dark speck cut clean out, or black 
top, or mouldy end, or change from side to side from the 
appearance of the first leaf, in short:—to let it never be 
forgotten that they are there, and that they will no more 
do without looking after than the stock on the farm. 
A clergyman told me the best place he had ever seen 
for keeping scarlet Geraniums was a particular cellar- 
one out of a thousand. It was neither wet nor dry, cold 
nor warm ; and all there was to do was to tie bundles of 
them together with all their leaves on, and hang them up 
against the walls, with the roots upwards. The leaves 
would dry, into hay as it were, very gradually, and man}' 
of them would hang on all the winter. It struck me at 
the time, that leaving the most of the leaves on a few 
plants and hanging them up thus, would be the surest test 
one could try to prove a cellar for the purpose. In nine 
cellars out "of ten, the first thing that would happen 
would be to seethe green leaves turn mouldy, and where 
one leaf gets the mould that cellar is certain to kill the 
Geraniums in winter, and dry cure them in the spring. 
My cellar is from 48° to 50°, be it a mild or a severe 
winter, and in ten days the most sleepy of all the Gera¬ 
niums ■would be up and doing in it; but as to anything 
moulding in it, nothing will; so there are the two ex¬ 
tremes. If I should ventilate the cellar, as I could do,-to 
keep Geraniums, it would cool the house so as to consume 
three times the expense of glass and mats. There are 
famous cellars for the purpose under many of the houses 
and castles in the country ; but there is no need to buy 
the experiments. Where churches are heated by hot 
water, many good opportunities occur for storing up- 
Geraniums for winter ; but, in general, I have a horror 
of ordinary cellars for this purpose, and I would choose 
the top of a house anywhere till I made quite certain of 
the cellar by experiments on a small scale. 
But of all the ways of wintering these Geraniums, the 
most up-hill work is when the slightest frost gets hold of 
them in the beds. Once nipped, the only safe course-is 
to cut them right down to the old hard wood, and to let 
the wounds be quite dried up before they are stored, then 
