THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, March 6, 1860. 
Mir 
ture is the right and proper place for all such. The 
dividing of a Waltonian Case into two compartments by 
a glass division answers the same purpose as the two 
boxes on a smaller scale. You keep one division up 
above 70°, for cuttings and for stove-plant seeds, and the 
other end as low as 50°, by the admission of so much air 
as will keep it down to that point; and the cold, dry, 
close frame, or a cold box with temporary glass covering, 
comes in to remove seedlings and rooted cuttings into as 
soon as they are ready, and the others are too hot for 
them. 
All these removals must be kept close for a time, a 
short time, till they can gain sufficient firmness to enable 
them to endure fresh air, sun heat, and handling, without 
risk of flagging in the meantime ; bid, after the moment 
they acquire this degree of strength, it would not suit 
them at all to be kept in a close place; they would soon 
begin to spindle and get weak a second time, and this 
time from want of air, not by too much heat. 
Usually gardeners manage their seedlings and cuttings in 
two departments only : a very hot place to get the one up 
and the other rooted, and the next place pretty warm and 
close, to inure them to stand finally in their cold pits and 
frames with air on and sun enough to keep them all going. 
Still there are the three necessary stages provided for in 
this detail. AVith a small greenhouse and a hotbed, the 
amateur contrives the same ends by a judicious use of his 
means. As soon as his raisings are fit to move from the 
hotbed, he takes them to the greenhouse, places the pots 
for the first week on the top of his flue near the farthest 
end of the house, and keeps the door or the sashes at 
that end closed, and calls it the warmest end of the house. 
Where there is no flue, he puts the pots down by the 
side of the front path for a while, and may be he fixes 
large sheets of newspapers between them and the side of 
the paths, or where most air could get at them ; and, 
lastly, he ups with them on the front stage, and now they 
are able to take their share of what the greenhouse plants 
require, abundance of air and as much heat as the weather 
gives. Then the potting off depends on the room, and 
every available inch is occupied w r ith newly potted off 
minimums. They, after that turn, must also be kept for 
a while away, as much as possible, from draughts and 
strong glimpses of the sun; but, by-and-by, they, too, 
come round, get hold of the new soil, and will be able 
to take their shares like the rest of the stock. 
Now, it is in the completeness of the arrangements for 
these three first stages in the life of a plant, be it from a 
seed or from a cutting, that the whole secret of propaga¬ 
tion depends. There are thousands of ways of getting 
at the second and third stages of the management besides 
this greenhouse way of the modest amateur; but the 
first way must embrace a smart heat by some means or 
other, and the three stages entail the necessity of shade 
and closeness ; but after cuttings or seedlings can stand 
sun and air, they can never have too much of both under 
glass ; but they may stand much longer in the same pots 
than many are aware of, if there is no room to allow 
their being potted singly, or in four and fives together in 
I one pot, or so many in little patches all over a pot, as in 
the colonising system of potting off many very small 
things. 
No mode of propagation or for rearing young stuff is 
so good as the old hotbed of dung, with linings and a 
safe covering at night, in the hands of practical, be they 
gardeners or knowing amateurs, nor any plan which is so 
certain of destruction in the hands of those who do not 
understand the management thereof;—for this class the 
tank system of bottom heat with hot water is the only 
way they cannot go wrong, or, if they do, it is the easiest 
way of getting over the scrape. 
The "Waltonian system of propagation is nothing more 
i or less than a complete, isolated, and portable “tank 
I system ” in minimum, and that is the whole secret in the 
success in working it. Any gardener who can work a 
tank-house, or tank-hotbed in a propagation-house, would 
be able to tackle a Waltonian without having ever heard 
a word for or against it—he knows the elementarics of 
propagation, if there is such a word, and he has only to 
apply them; and for those who have yet to learn the 
elements themselves there is no hope till they master 
them; but now that simple contrivance is the best and 
easiest way of arriving at a fair average understanding of 
the mysteries of propagation. Never mind if you lose 
one-half of your first beginnings, nobody may hear of it; 
you will have no cause to change your name, like the man 
with the Boursault stocks or his Stoke Newington friend 
and failures—nothing of the kind ; and know assuredly 
that a plant or bed of one’s own raising is worth ten 
times the money spent by members of the peerage on 
acres of glass and first-class gardeners. 
Well, there never was such a talk about gardening as 
there is just now ; never such quantities of seeds in my 
time, and seldom was there so great a need of them. If 
you could see the many private letters which we receive 
about new seeds alone, you would be astonished how we 
could find time to read them all. Some, even in my 
house, look anxiously for the postman four times a-day ; 
but I dread his knock—he overwhelms me each time with 
his benefits. But that is the way to keep gardening 
going. I always say the more writing about gardening 
the more fun, the more funds for all departments in tho 
trade, and the morp happy for those who can fly the soot 
of cities and take share in the general pleasure and inno¬ 
cent amusement of the garden. 
To bring any of this to bear on the practice of the 
present season, let me caution all young gardeners against 
the common practice of raising seedlings, or attempting 
the plan of putting them in such heat as is requisite for 
their Cucumbers. A small, or rather a narrow one-light 
box—say a two-feet-six-inches-wide box, and of the stop 
and run as the Cucumber-frame, to be placed, as it were, 
on the end linings of a hotbed—such three-feet-wide 
linings as Mr. Fish mentioned last week would be just 
such a place as I should like to see thus tried, and 
could be tried at one end of a range of lights. The heat 
would not be much over 50° ; and I am perfectly satis¬ 
fied that nine-tenths of flower-garden seeds will vegetate 
as readily in that as in 70°, and the seedlings do with far 
less nursing. 
There is no question, also, about many seeds doing 
badly in very strong heat, and some never come up if the 
heat is over 50°. All my seedling Geraniums, of which I 
have grown millions, do better from a heat of 50° in 
spring. The way I manage with all seeds in the spring 
is to sow them earlier than is usual, and to give them 
more time and less heat even out of doors; and in the 
hardest and latest season I have adopted that plan on 
principle ; and I may say, without fear or flattery, that 
the system is the surest and most safe turn in the whole 
of gardening; and I repudiate entirely, as against my 
own practice and the evidence of my senses, the doctrine 
that cold is bad for seeds :—it is nothing of the kind; a 
seed never suffers from ordinary cold till it vegetates, 
and it never vegetates till the warmth necessary for 
sprouting arrives. I have Scarlet Eunners now hanging 
on the old straw of last autumn. The pods were dangling 
in all the frost of the winter ; and I should be justified 
from long experience to warrant every seed of them to 
grow just as freely as if they were housed at the proper 
time, and kept free as Potatoes from frost. But I would 
not recommend a practice founded on the fact that cold 
never yet hurt any of our common seeds. I merely 
adduce it to account for what some people might consider 
to be a great risk—to put valuable seeds to such slow 
work as 50°, when the usual plan is Cucumber heat and 
cutting heat for most early seeds. That slow work is the 
sure work, however ; and Peril!a NanMnensis is the last 
on the list of experiments which will prove the fact to the 
most inveterate believer in the hot haste and less progress 
