122 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, November 29 1859. 
all sorts of vegetables to all sorts of customers with all 
kinds of tastes and tempers, than any gardener I know, I 
took her advice and Matchless, dug enough for two beds, 
and worked the ground just as an old gardener would do 
for a lady who had been kind to him. 
The weather was awfully hot and suffocating; the 
earth at a foot deep was almost as hot as one could bear 
to handle, but that was as much from the moisture in the 
cocoa-nut fibre as from the heat of the season. I gave it 
a good watering, nevertheless, to make a regular hotbed 
of it, as it were, and so to gain time. When the surface 
dried a little next day I stirred it up again to get a tilth 
for the seeds, as the farmers say. After sowing, another 
watering ; and immediately after that watering I took 
Samuel Gilbert’s plan, and sifted some dry soil over the 
wet surface, so as to keep the surface from caking and to 
keep in the moisture. I then put a double, or rather tw o 
mats over the place, the mats lying fiat on the seed-bed. 
At the end of the third day I lifted the corner of one of 
the mats, and found the seeds bursting the seed-coat and 
no more; fourth day, a little more forward; and at the 
end of the fifth day the seed-leaves were heaving up the 
surface of the ground; and on the morning of the sixth 
day I could sec the green of the seed-leaves just coming 
through. What made me so anxious to watch the seeds 
was to be in time to take off the mats the moment the 
seedlings broke ground; if I had left the mats on that 
day till two or three in the afternoon the seedlings would 
have been spoiled for my purpose. 
Thousands, and tens of thousands, of far better seeds 
and seedlings are destroyed every year of our lives by a 
few more hours of unnatural shade, and too much heat 
and moisture. Just think of that! Five hours out of 
the ordinary course of nature arc sufficient to destroy 
fifty thousand seedlings, or make them so spindly and so 
miffy that no mortal can do aught with them for w eeks 
and mouths, if they live so long : or if they are of such a 
nature as the old witches used to be—so dry and wiry 
that nothing short of burning flames could get the life 
wholly extinct within them—why they will neither die, 
nor live, nor prosper, but remain to bother one out of all 
patience, and to tempt one to vow that all gardeners and 
gardening, seedsmen and book writers on gardening, and 
all who read and recommend them, ought to be sent to 
Jericho for their pains and prejudices, and so let the 
world have rest and peace for a season, while all the fault 
and failing were on the side of the tempted—he did not 
watch his seedlings as I did; he did not screen them 
from a burning sun as I did: neither did he prepare the 
seed-bed as I did—therefore he is in the wrong box if he 
wishes me among the rest either to Bath or Coventry. 
But let us hear the end of it. As soon as the seedlings 
broke ground I took the mats ofi' entirely, and put up 
long stakes on the south side of the seed-beds, and 
fastened the mats across between the sun and the beds, 
so as to cast a shade at mid-day across the farthest bed. 
I took down the mats the last thing every evening, and 
put them up soon after breakfast. I also sprinkled the 
seedlings every evening with a very fine rose-pot—just 
enough to put them in dew and no more. In three 
weeks from the sowing the plants were as much of my 
pride—indeed more so—as my new Cyclamens just then 
splitting their seed-coats nearly two inches below the 
surface. I used then to say that nothing is so old or so 
well known but that it may be improved on in some way 
or other ; and that it is a bad sign of a good cook if the 
dinner party or the family circle can find out the roast, 
the fried, the boiled, or the baked of to-day and to-morrow 
in the “ made up ” of that or those that‘follow. I made 
up my mind to write essays on rearing all kinds of 
seeds in all seasons and weathers; and the essay for each 
kind and season to be as new and as different from the 
rest as veal pies are from pasties. But again let us hear 
the end. 
It was now getting on to the time of pricking out 
Coleworts from the seed-bed, to make them more stocky 
and shorter in the legs than one can see them round 
London. But that very day, or the night before, the 
fly took to them — and I took to the fly, and did all 
I could to kill it or keep it down; I even wont 
to my oldest books for some dotherum to exterminate 
the vermin, after all I knew and all I recollected 
had completely failed to even frighten one of them. I 
never was so completely done in my whole experience ; 
and it is only declaring the bare truth to say, that if 
the getting up of Colewort plants had been tried this 
year for the first time, I should be as blameless ns those 
who failed with the new grass, the Spergula piljfera, if 
I had written a whole book on purpose to prove the folly 
and madness of attempting to rear Cabbage plants in 
this climate, and with our present knowledge of the 
science of vegetation. I could show that no gardener 
from Adam to this day could do better or more scienti¬ 
fically than I did it. I could put the whole weight of 
my long experience into the scale against such mad 
projects ; and were it not from knowing, by my own, that 
the outer skin of all public writers is electro-plated with 
brass, I would try and tickle them backwards, till I 
thought it was just as much as they could endure to 
bear and be alive, for presuming to recommend a “ nation 
of shopkeepers ” to spend their money on such foolery 
as rearing Cabbages from seeds, when they would come 
so much easier and cheaper from Cabbage plants. 
Now, after one makes such an open confession of 
pride, vain glory, bad luck, and disappointment, and 
would do the scratching, if it were of any use, to the 
bargain, he cannot well turn round on the industrious 
hopefuls who put just as much spirit ana strength in 
their Spergula attempts as I did in any Coleworts, and 
shared the same fate. Better it will be for all parties, 
and all kinds of plants, if we can but make the manage¬ 
ment of Spergula plants as easy of understanding as 
that of Coleworts or common Cabbage. Even after we 
get it to that point we must not forget my failure after 
all my practice ; for scores will be just as liable to bad 
luck as I was, and hundreds will never learn sufficiently 
to enable them to keep their heads above water in 
gardening at all. I never could put much faith in what 
Samuel Gilbert and other old authors say about sowing 
seeds at the full or wane of the moon, or at the different 
points of the other planets; but I know of a charm as 
true as gospel against fear, prejudice, and bad luck in 
the sowing and management of any sort of seed one can 
think of, and that charm is this—Let the disappointed 
gardener or the unsuccessful amateur give us his full 
name and address, along with the story of his way of 
doing the plant, and that will enable us to judge of what 
might be expected from such a person: that charm is 
quite as safe as science itself, and we shall act upon it as 
such. But as if no charm or rule of action was with¬ 
out an occasional exception, there is my own failure with 
the commonest of all plants, the Cabbage Coleworts. 
The truth is this. All the seeds of Spergvla pilifera in 
England last spring would not suffice under the best 
management to plant one quarter of an acre of lawn; 
and suppose the whole of them to have been in the hands 
of one man, and that man to be the best gardener in the 
country, and that he gave his mind and his attention to 
make the best of them, he could not, under the best 
treatment, have his seedling plants ready for transplant¬ 
ing into a permanent place before last October certain. 
The seeds are small, and the seedlings are the very 
smallest of all the seedlings ever reared ; and were they 
not of a nature as difficult to destroy as the nature of the 
Dandelion itself, notone of them that was planted outlast 
June could have lived out that extraordinarily broiling- 
hot summer to tell the tale ; but under careful"treatment 
they did hold out, and progressed to astonishment, where 
ten thousand other kinds of stronger plants would hardly 
keep alive. I saw them at that pitch myself in the 
