313 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, February 21, 18G0. 
the freshness of the recent roots, and the extent of their 
number and strength, will very soon turn to be the cause 
of the ruin or destruction of the plant.” I misunderstood 
this ; and the oldest gardener there was, as far as I could 
learn, just as much at fault. 
Thus, only four years before the first ReformBiil.some of 
the best gardeners in the country did not know or under¬ 
stand the principle of potting plants. The more healthy 
and more numerous the young roots, the worse they must, 
consequently, be for the health of a plant with the centre 
of the ball dry, and the old roots in that part of the ball 
so much shrivelled from the long rest, that they can 
no more pass up the one-quarter of the moisture from 
so many young mouths than a rain-water pipe, that is 
half-choked with leaves and dirt, can pass down the 
water from the roofs of our houses. Often have I thought 
of this part of the lecture of 1828 when I read of Calceo¬ 
larias going to the bad. “But,” said he, “the new method 
rids us of all that annoyance. We find no hindrance in 
the growth, or any risk about shaking off the whole ball 
from all rested plants whatsoever. The stimulus from 
the new soil causes the hardest parts of the oldest roots 
to issue a host of young feeders, and the general impulse 
thus given to the whole system of the plant will cause 
the new method of potting to be adopted by all;” and 
so forth. 
The lecturer can now say how far my memory serves 
me, at any rate ; for I know he reads The Cottage 
Gardener, so do Mr. Barnet, Mr. Low, and Mr. 
Shai’p. But the first person who introduced “ the new 
system of potting ” beyond the Grampian, range is Mr. 
N. Niven, now at Drumconda, near Dublin. As early as 
1821 or 1822 Mr. Niven grew young Tines in pots at 
Belladrum, beyond Inverness, dried them off in the 
autumn, killed all the young roots in so doing, shook 
them out in the spring, and planted and fruited them in 
small frames he had for Cucumbers. I saw alibis plants, 
his pruning, and his fruit, and he wrote a paper at that 
time explaining the whole in the “ Memoirs ” of the 
Caledonian Horticultural Society. 
Soon after the lecture of 1828 Mr. Marnock, now of 
the Botanic Gardens, Regent’s Park, invented and 
published the first plan for saving young roots from 
being scorched in pots by exposure to the sun by his 
system of double potting. Plunging pots, for the same 
end, is of older date. About that time Dr. Bindley 
published the first figure of Aphelandra cristata from 
the Earl of Shrewsbury, I think ; and that plant was the 
breaking up of the ice and the crust of ages which 
covered the eyes of half the world from the fact, that 
all resting plants should be so completely rested as to 
render them exactly as Mr. Rivers’s plan has improved 
his pot culture of fruit trees—that is, dry them in the 
resting to such a degree as will completely kill the young 
roots. The great patrons of gardening were in raptures 
with Aphelandra cristata. We old gardeners had to 
bring it out in first style : three, four, or six heads of 
spikes on a three-year-old plapt was the maxim of that 
day ; but to get up so high we had to begin with a stump 
as low as six or nine inches, about this time of j r ear, in 
a 32-pot, and bottom heat which we kept going as long 
as head-room lasted ; then into a bark-bed in the stove, 
and fresh pot every six weeks, till at last we reach 
No. 12 and No. 8-pots—enormous pots ! then the plants 
would stand in the drawing-rooms after the house was 
too hot for Chrysanthemums, or just by the drawing¬ 
room doors in the conservatory. 
But where were such stools to be kept during the 
winter P Some one discovered that they would be quite 
safe in the balls, and out of the pots, all the winter, under 
the stages in the plant-stoves, where they did beautifully 
for three months without a drop of water; and in the 
spring, when the balls were broken, the young roots were 
as dry as chaff, and quite as dusty—dead and gone weeks 
ago. Nothing would then do but that the gentlefolks 
must have all soft-wooded stove plants got up in the same 
way and style for the living-rooms, and for the conserva¬ 
tory. liupellia juncea was the next after Aphelandra ; 
Justicia carnea the next; then a host of Justicias and 
other Acanthads; with Tineas, Clerodendrons, and no end 
of things ; and last of all came Poinsettia pulcherrima, 
and all the hybrid Fuchsias ; and every one of these, and 
such kinds under that particular system, lose dvery 
morsel of their young roots in winter—or, if they do not, 
depend upon it they were not properly rested. 
Every Fuchsia that is over two years old, and was laid 
by last October and November, to rest for the winter, 
.ought to have all parts of their young roots now quite as 
dead as the young roots of those very fruit trees spoken 
of by Mr. Rivers. And do you suppose an old man like 
me, who has been up to the elbows in all this, would 
allow the young spalpeens all over the country to twit 
my own best pot and pen companion, for saying that all 
this was “ wisely ordained,” without explaining the 
reason why it was so? At the time of that ordination 
every plant carried its own roots, great and small, the 
year round, save Irids, and a few other bulbs. Mr. 
Woods’s one-shift system, and Mr. Rivers’s fruit-tree- 
potting system, were not thought of then, and no pro¬ 
vision for the lives of the young roots was made ; con¬ 
sequently away they go, and we have founded a branch 
of our practice on the fact that go they must. But to 
establish a practice founded on a belief that they must 
needs leave us, whether we would or not, would be too 
apt to cause some of our own number to go instead, not 
from finding the place too dry to bear, but too hot to 
endure. A Fuchsia will keep its roots as fresh as new 
laid eggs as long as you keep watering the pot; so will a 
Tine, a Peach, or any fruit tree whatever ; and no Fuchsia 
or fruit tree has ever yet lost an inch of its roots in good 
ground, or ground that was good enough for the kind, as 
long as that kind was in health and in the vigour of 
youth. 
Similar in kind, and in degree, with this death in the 
roots, is the common fallacy of “leaves making roots, 
and roots leaves.” We have just seen that roots—I mean 
the young roots, or annual growth of roots—will live or 
die at the end of every season of our lives, according to 
a rule in practical gardening, not after a natural law, or 
a scientific idea of the thing—nothing of the kind. A 
scientific idea carried up to the top of a tree, or down to the 
extremity of the roots, tells us that neither roots nor leaves 
are made in the absence of either; but practical obser¬ 
vation tells just the contrary. Roots are made as freely 
when there are no leaves as when they abound the most, 
and leaves just the same ; but, after leaves are made, in 
the absence of roots, they will not stand long without 
aid from roots ; and if there are no roots, away they 
go also, like the roots in a dry ballthe system or the 
plant is too dry for them to exist on, just as the ball was 
too dry to exist in. But roots, in well-conditioned soil, 
when made in the absence of leaves, never die, or not till 
the whole plant above them and older roots behind them 
perish first. Many experiments to prove that fact were 
suggested to me as far back as the autumn of 1831, and 
they were proved to the satisfaction of the best physio¬ 
logist that England has yet produced—the late Mr. 
Knight, of Downton Castle, who, also, before that period 
had some misgivings about young roots dying under a 
natural law; but it did not require the practical ex¬ 
perience of this time of day to convince him to the con¬ 
trary, and no one was ever more anxious than he to 
guard the young idea against building up systems of 
practice on a baseless, so-called-scientific foundation. 
D. Beaton. 
A WORD FOR THE MANETTI. 
What an awful pother there is just now about the poor 
Manetti. What has the poor tiling done ? Has it refused to grow 
at all ? or has it refused to grow on any but the very best soil, 
