THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, June 1, 1858. 131 
: too, and the flavour of fruits, are very incomplete 
: without free ventilation. What poor-coloured things 
the Iiihcs sanguinea, or the 7 Veigelia rosea , are, when 
forced; all owing to the want of breathing the pure 
air and a puff of wind occasionally, together with 
a deficiency of solar light. As to fruits, only observe 
what liberal ventilation is allowed by good gardeners 
to Peaches, Melons, Grapes, &c., when ripening; that 
is, providing they are not going against time, as it is 
called. 
Before concluding my explanations, I must beg to 
offer an opinion, that if all hothouses were properly 
constructed, and properly heated, together with that 
full amount of provision for air moisture, which would, 
when necessary, prove equal to any demand, there is 
scarcely anything we cultivate but would be better for 
air-giving night and day. This I have, certainly, never 
seen realised, and never had it in my power to carry 
out, but it is an old conviction, and 1 am by no means 
solitary in the opinion. Indeed, when it is considered 
that everything we cultivate in houses, not only endures, 
but en joys such conditions in their wild state, how is it 
possible to doubt it? The great obstacle, it would 
appear, to a full recognition of this fact, is the dread of 
over-dry in-door atmosphere, through the constant loss 
of vapour. But surely we have means in these times 
of producing as constant a supply. One thing may 
here be observed, that in severe weather, or when 
there is a certain amount of discrepancy between the 
inside and outside air, and air moisture continues to be 
engendered within, it is very apt to descend in drip, 
a thing by all means to be avoided. How, with a 
constant ventilation, there is no need to fear this drip. 
Of course, such would consume a little more fuel, but 
this amount would not be found very material. 
It is only proper, however, to remark here, that, 
albeit constant ventilation might be congenial to the 
inmates of our houses in general, yet there are many 
special objects in gardening which demand other con¬ 
siderations. The early forcer, endeavouring to produce 
his Grapes, Pines, Peaches, &c., for sale, or for exhibi¬ 
tion, has frequently to push them forward by all 
possible means ; and such circumstances require that 
a great amount of sun heat be enclosed betimes in the 
afternoon, and a high and moist atmosphere preserved 
during the earlier part of the night. I have here to 
confess, that constant ventilation would frequently 
cause the loss of a week or two ; and this is, in many 
cases, a serious affair as concerns market prices, or ex¬ 
hibition days. Such things as early Cucumbers seem 
particularly to enjoy this close shutting up ; it, of 
course, hurries them forward: at the same time we all 
know that Cucumbers succeed in the ve^r highest 
degree in warm summers, and under proper circum¬ 
stances, albeit they are subject to winds, storms, and 
other vicissitudes. R. Eerington. 
ASPARAGUS. 
Every writer on Asparagus, for the last two hundred years, 
was radically wrong—D. Deaton among the rest. In garden¬ 
ing, the word radical means root or roots, or belonging to the 
roots of plants. We were all radically wrong ; that is, we were 
wrong at the roots. 
It is curious that four generations of gardeners should pass 
away, without any one of them having ever read the true story 
about the roots of Asparagus. I took the pains to look back 
into the old authors, to be able to say so much. But all that 
time the tiling was well known to another race of gardeners, 
who did Dot know a B from a bull’s foot mark. How I 
came to know it was by the merest chance in the world. A 
gardener, of my own age, who knows his P’s and Q’s very 
well (but these, and the letter O, to sow his annuals round it, 
are the only three letters he ever troubled himself with), had 
a few beds of most excellent Asparagus for the last four years; 
and, last summer, having seen the ground on each side of the 
Asparagus beds filled with self-sown Asparagus seedlings, I 
asked him to save me a lot, to make a new bed in the Expe- i 
rimental Garden; and he did so, in his own usual way, which 
is quite new to the whole reading world of gardeners. 
I went for the young Asparagus plants in the third week 
in April; but the first week in May is the best time for this 
kind of “bedding-out.” Well, my friend had the plants 
ready for me, sure enough. They were two years old and one 
year old, mixed. He forked them out of the ground last 
November, and “ left them to be proved for hardiness”—ex¬ 
posed to all weathers on the bare surface of the same piece of 
ground—and out of 260 plants, or roots, four only died from 
the severe frost at the beginning of March; the rest were 
as plump and healthy, in every respect, as those which were 
not disturbed, and they were ten days in advance of the same 
kind of roots in the same piece of ground ; every one of them 
was sprouted, more or less ! My friend’s practice over more 
than forty years, as a head-gardener, and that of his father 
and grandfather before him, went to prove that Asparagus 
seedlings are, more or less, hardy according to the “ suction” 
of the old plants in the bed; some years and some beds 
will “ throw ” seedlings, one-fourth of which cannot be 
depended on for strength and for hardiness. His practice 
has been to expose the roots for a new bed, to “prove” them 
whenever he had to make a new bed, by forking them out of 
the ground in the autumn; giving them a winter’s exposure 
to the frost, and planting m the spring when they are 
sprouted one inch. By this treatment he never failed, or had 
a gap in any one of his Asparagus beds all that time.—D. 
Beaton. 
OH SOME MOULDS REEERRED BY AUTHORS | 
TO EUMAGO, AHD OH CERTAIH ALLIED 1 
OR AHALAGOUS FORMS. 
By the Rev. M. J. Berkeley, MA., F.L.S., and J. B. II. J. 
Desmazieres. 
It is well known that the leaves of various trees are fre¬ 
quently, more or les3, covered with a black sooty or velvety 
stratum, to the great detriment of their beauty, and fre¬ 
quently of their health and productiveness, by choking up 
the stomates, and thereby preventing the access of the atmos¬ 
pheric air to the tissue of the leaves. A case of this kind, 
which occurred in Ceylon on coffee, was, a short time since, 
noticed by one of us in this Journal; the Orange trees in the 
Azores and Madeira have, of late, most grievously suffered 
from a similar affection ; and Dr. Montagne has very recently 
given an account of an extensive disease of this description 
amongst the Olive trees in the neighbourhood of Perpignan, 
in 1829. Not only the leaves, but the branches were, more or 
less, covered, and the harvest was materially affected. Similar 
growths are common on the leaves of Plum, Lime, Hazel, 
Rose, &c., and on the different species and varieties of the 
genus Citrus in our conservatories. They are often, if not 
always, preceded by honey-dew, whether arising from aphides 
or from a sugary excretion from the leaves themselves ; fre¬ 
quently, too, they are accompanied by some species of coccus, 
especially in the genus Citrus. However similar they may be 
in outward appearance, the parasites by which these diseases i 
are produced differ materially in structure; in some the 
characters are so singular, that we have thought some account j 
of the particular group by which they arq exhibited may not ; 
be uninteresting. 
A portion of these plants consists of species of the genus 
Antennaria , as that of the Olive mentioned above, specimens 
of which were gathered by Dr. Scoulcr, in Portugal, in 1846. 
Others occur commonly on Heath, on different species of 
Cistus, on the Scotch Fir, &c. One very highly developed 
form, rising an inch or more from the surface, and investing 
whole plants with a spongy mass, is found in the islands of 
the southern hemisphere, and in South America; another 
species frequently covers the leaves of the Ferns in Juan 
Fernandez ; and one has been sent by Mr. Curtis, from South j 
Carolina, on the leaves of Kalmia latifolia, which appears to ! 
be identical with an undescribed species gathered by Mr. 
Broome in the west of England on the leaves of the Sycamore. 
Other forms were separated by Persoon under the generic 
