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THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN Febkuaky 21, I860. 
of us have been over head and ears in gardening all our 
lives ; both of us understand, and personally experience, 
the pleasures which gardening brings on with age, when 
other pleasures share the same fate as. the young roots of 
liis potted fruit trees, and we are both naturally of that 
turn of mind which impels one, as it were, involuntarily 
to volunteer in the good cause as many as our pens and 
passions can reach, or influence in the smallest degree. 
Being the oldest, I sometimes stand against him so much 
upon the prerogative of ancient wisdom, as to seem to 
wish to crow the Emperor ; but nothing is farther north 
than that idea. The whole truth is this in one sentence : 
Mr. Bivers never took to potting, from necessity, till the 
orchard-house fancy took possession of his whole mind 
and frame, when he must needs do so many turns with 
his own hands as will insure the perfect safety and success 
of his hobby ; while I had to suck my thumb from the 
cradle to the potting-bench, and think and ransack my 
brains with reading and studying, and with learning the 
very language in which the best gardening of the world 
is written for our learning ; and I had to learn as much of 
it. from reading as Mr. Elvers did by seeing it practised 
under his own eye, when he could spare the time from 
his gun and dogs, and as much of it from the necessity of 
using my head and hands on it, to keep 'the rest of the 
body together, as makes me more confident of the laws 
of Nature on it, than could be justified by a lighter and 
more easy acquaintance, such as he must have enjoyed in 
his younger days. 
The practical and scientific minds of gardening were 
first brought face to face in the year 1822, in Loudon’s 
“ Encyclopedia of Gardening,” and it was in the summer 
of 1824 that I first heard of the doctrine of the annual 
death of the young ends of all roots. The question was 
argued between two first-rate gardeners, the one then 
living at Tarbot House, in Eo9s-shire, with the father of 
the present Marchioness of Stafford ; the other with the 
father and mother of the present Baronet who enjoys the 
beauties of Altyre, near Eorres. Mr. Mills, a gardener 
near Beading, and well known to Mr. Low, of Clapton, 
was the very person who had to do the experiments, to 
prove the doctrine on the wrong side of the book, and so 
as to prove clearly that Mr. McLean, recently from the 
London boards, and latterly from the honourable firm of 
“Lee’s Nursery,” to Altyre aforesaid, had taken his 
degrees in the then improved education of the London 
school of gardening. If Mr. Mills should live to the age 
of Methuselah, ho can never forget these experiments, 
nor another in which a Cucumber-frame was tarred or 
pitched inside for a different experiment. Here, then, 
the best Pelargoniums, and the coral plant, Erythrina 
crista-galli, were the chief subjects which lost their young 
roots while resting, or after being cut down, and let to 
dry at the roots, and the practice was to clear away only 
as much of the old ball as covered the dead roots; the 
innovation of the London school consisted in doing away 
with all the old ball, and beginning afresh with all the 
compost fresh throughout. 
The next regular contest on the subject under my own 
eye was in the spring of 1827, in the Experimental Garden 
at Edinburgh under Mr. Barnet, then, also, fresli from 
the Chiswick Garden, and now just as fresh in the Botanic 
Garden, Eegent’s Park. He had Yines in pots ; they 
turned dry in the balls, and lost their young roots in 
consequence ; and he would have the balls entirely shaken 
off also, to the scandal of the schools of modern Athens. 
In a lecture on that way which he, the said Mr. Barnet, 
gave in the spring of,1828, he mentioned a very large 
Eranthemum pulcliellum belonging to Professor Dunbar 
—Professor of Greek in the University. This Eranthe- 
mum stood for years in the same large pot. Mr. Barnet 
said it ought to be let to dry in the winter, and to have 
the ball renewed every spring ; but a Mr. Crighton, who 
was one of the hands at the Experimental, insisted on it 
that that would kill the roots as surely as the roots of the I 
said pot Vines. “ Only the young roots, and they ought 
to go,” replied Mr. Barnet. Mr. Sharp, who is now 
gardener to the Earl of Eglinton, and a Mr. Alves, who 
reads The Cottage Gaedenee, were both at this lecture ; 
and both of them declared to me that they could see Mr. 
Crighton’s ears pricking up and his hair stand on end at 
this outlandish heresy : he could stand no more of it—he 
went over to Ireland, and may be to Borne, for I never 
heard any more of him. 
In the spring of 1829, Mr. Mackay, then holding the 
Clapton Nursery, and now living on the fruit of his 
industry—“ a perfect gentleman,” as Tom Parfit would 
say—down in Hertfordshire, gave a lecture on the very 
same subject in the Clapton Nursery to about thirty 
gardeners, young and old, and from all parts of the king¬ 
dom. Mr. H. Low may recollect that lecture, for he was 
of the number. It was suggested by the appearance of a 
newly potted Epacris which drooped very much. The 
man who potted that lot was called over the coals in the 
first part of the lecture. The lecturer had a winning 
way, which carried his hearers with him to conviction; 
and he told us the drooping of that plant had more 
meaning in it than some of us might understand :—that 
it was owing to one of two things;—that the man, “ that 
man,” who potted this plant was either a disciple of the 
theory that all young roots must of necessity die back in 
winter, and cut away too many of the supposed dead roots 
at potting ; or else the pot got too much sun last autumn, 
and scorched all the young roots which were next the 
pot, and the ball was potted whole, dead roots and all; 
and the plant was now dying, either from want of roots, 
or from having a layer of dead roots between the old and 
the new soil of the ball. The plant was turned out, and 
the latter misfortune was found to have been the cause of 
the mischief. The lecturer then went on to say that all 
plants like Heaths and Epacrises, which had liair-like 
roots, ought to be very diligently examined at the time of 
potting to see if all their roots were sound, as they were 
peculiarly liable to lose part of their roots by too much 
or too little water in winter, or too much exposure of the 
pots to the sun during the autumn ; and that no more of 
their balls should be disturbed in the spring than just to 
release the extreme ends of the roots from going round 
and round the ball, or among the crocks at the bottom of 
the ball;—that thus relieved at the proper moment would 
allow the first move of the roots to be made direct into 
the fresh soil, which was the grand secret of all potting. 
“ But,” said he, “ there is another side to the picture,” 
—pots which we store away for the winter, such as I now 
forget, but the Hydrangea was one of them, and that he 
brought or had sent for to explain “ the other side ” of 
the question. Plants such as these, which we allow to go 
dry at the roots during the winter, must necessarily lose 
the small fibrous roots for lack of moisture; but expe¬ 
rience has taught us that that is much better for them 
and for us. As soon as they are set to grow in the spring 
they are able to reproduce young feeding roots from all 
parts of the older ones, and we can manage them in much 
smaller pots and in less room in consequence. “ But 
what I want more particularly to explain to you and to 
recommend to you for future practice,” he went on to 
say, is the great improvement in the new way of potting 
all such plants as this Hydrangea, which lose their roots 
by drying. Eormorly the practice was to pare away just 
as much of the old ball as took away the dead roots, and 
to retain the whole of the centre for the safety of the old 
roots. That practice was the bane of gardening since 
Miller’s day. The old soil in the centre of the ball was 
so liable to get too dry before the fresh soil on the outside 
required water, that plants were being actually starved! 
He was most impressive on one thing at this point. 
“ Many of you may probably believe a set of roots to be 
in good condition when you observe the fresh looks of 
the new ones coming out through the new part of the 
ball. Believe me, however, when I tell you the fact that 
