352 
• THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, Septbmbeb 11, 1860. 
guide is the godfather to it; I shall be the nurse and 
surety the first season, and you must do the rest. Santo- 
lina chamce-cyparissus is the hook name of the plant. 
Brotany was its name in Covent Garden a hundred years 
back—a corruption of Abrotanum—but Lavender Cotton 
is the name by which it is best known. It is a very 
dwarf, close-growing, silvery-looking plant; and little 
plants of it from summer slips and cuttings, like Wall¬ 
flowers, will make the tidiest row yet thought of; and it 
will last good for use five or six years with the same kind 
and degree of management as is given to Box-edgings. 
It will look very much like Cerastium tomentosum, with 
only a tenth of the work to keep it to the mark after you 
have the proper number of plants. Another hit for the 
nurseries, who work for the million, a match bedder for 
Mr. Donald’s sprig Lavender-bed at Hampton Court, and 
for fastigiatas in a bed of the Crystal Palace Lobelia, and 
■so forth. 
There are scores of specimen plants in bloom now in 
the Queen’s Cottage grounds of the old Ceanothus ameri- 
•canus, white as the driven snow, from two feet to thirty 
inches high, and from thirty inches to a yard in diameter, 
•quite fit for pots to go to the Crystal Palace Show; and 
no one hardly knows there is such a thing in Europe. 
It is the New Jersey Tea plant, which they used during 
the war of independence; and nearly as many of Ceanothus 
intermedins —a seedling from the last by the pollen of 
. azureus, raised by Mr. Masters, of Canterbury. They 
, thus grow and bloom in an open field-like situation, and 
not six feet above tide-mark. But there is a secret in the 
management. The plants are treated as lialf-shrubby, 
-or suffruticose, and such like are cut down to the old 
wood, like Tea Boses when the frost is over; the tops of 
the shoots, with the seed-pods, are also cut in October, so 
. that none but ripe wood is left for the frost to play on, 
and keep the sap in tune through the winter, to be cut 
back as above late in the spring. Thus managed, the 
last winter does not seem to have affected them in the 
.smallest degree; and such blooming shrubs, coming in 
after the Spiraeas for the autumn, should be held in¬ 
valuable. LTypericum proliferum —as close as a clipped 
hedge, and in one mass of golden yellow all over, two 
feet high and as much through, and as easy to do as a 
Currant bush—should be in the front of all suburban 
evergreens, where it would bloom all through September 
and the first half of October. Ligustrum japonicum, or 
Japan Privet, is also one mass of white just now, and is 
an excellent dwarf evergreen without any of the common 
looks of a Privet about it. 
What would you say to one thousand Aloes in blossom 
at one time, all from the seed of one sort, the Ji/ifolia, 
and turning out five or six kinds of blossoms, or ways of 
blooming them? Well, Mr. Williamson, who has the 
charge of all this, raised pretty nigh two thousand seedling 
Aloes of that kind four or five years back, and so many 
of them are now in bloom ; and were it not that tbey all 
carry the thready character on the leaves, four good 
species might thus have their origin. The flower-stems 
run up from five to seven or eight feet high, some of 
them much branched, and some not so at all, and some 
between both extremes ; some with round ball-and-cup 
florist flowers, and some with botanical starry petals—in 
short, in all the various ways of the sporting mood. A 
thousand even of these, at the age of five years, would 
give a shilling a-year for rent and labour cost, at the 
nursery price of 5 s. per flowering plant; for it is a poor 
trade in five-feet bloom-spikes, or four feet in bloom of a 
seven-feet spike, that could not command that moderate 
price. One thousand five-shilling pieces are what my 
boasted seedlings never brought me in all my days. 
In the private home nursery here has been proved that 
the Cupressus macrocarpa and C. Lamhertiana come up in¬ 
differently from the same packet of seeds, yet the two are 
as distinct in all their looks and ways as any two related 
species in the family. Let no one who loves beautiful- 
looking trees go with the idea that if he or she has a 
Lamhertiana Cypress only, or a macrocarpa “ by itself,” 
that he and she have all thejr ought. Macrocarpa is an 
upright and more close-growing sort, with a deeper green 
than Lamhertiana. There is a valuable sport of Cupretsus 
Goveniana from seeds here, which is as weeping as a 
Willow, whether it be of Babylon, or of English, or 
Scoth, or American origin, for there are three such 
weeping ones ; but the American Weeping Willow, which 
makes such beautiful standards at Hew, ought certainly 
to be Scotch, for the whole thing is but the “Pack¬ 
thread” Willow of the Scotch packers weeping for its 
native freedom ; whereas the Kilmarnock W eeping 
Willow is a bold, broad, and Plum-like-leaved sad va¬ 
riety of Salix caprea, the Goat-nibbled Willow. . At 
all events a match pair of standards of the American 
Weeping Willow would look exceeding well down at the 
bottom of your garden, and the pair of the Kilmarnock 
pendulums just where you wanted something the winter 
before last. As to the weeping Goveniana Cypress, it 
will have to go through the fiery trial of excessive pro¬ 
pagation in the nurseries ere any of us can venture a 
risk on it. 
In this home-nursery are very many curious revelations, 
besides an enormous stock of good things for all parts 
and departments of the pleasure-ground and arboretum— 
trees of all kinds, shrubs the same, climbers, twiners, 
creepers, trailers, under and upper clothings for hills and 
valleys and plains. Sowings, layerings, graftings, bud¬ 
dings, cuttings, and every other species and variety of 
propagation, go on here without any of us being the wiser ; 
and then when an acre is, or ten or twenty acres are, to be 
fresh planted, instead of going to the “ board ” for money 
to buy the plants, the plants are there at hand, and in a 
style more suitable for anxious planters than the style of 
some people in some parts of the world. Whole ranges 
of turf-pits behind, and double ranges of glass-pits in 
front of them are now brimful of reason, law, and logic, 
and no one is the wiser of it beyond the garden boundary. 
The quantities of cuttings that I saw at work would be 
sufficient for all their flower-beds, if the kinds were 
suitable, which they were not. When you asked, some 
time ago, what evergreens would come from cuttings here, 
they would or could tell or ask you which would not, for 
they knew none that would not; but some of which would 
not pay that way, and their great aim is to get every 
morsel of a thing to pay, and to pay such per centage as 
few aspire to obtain. I was so taken to by their logic for 
making things paying, that I got a statement drawn 
up for me of the numbers, and their heights and size of 
all the park trees in their park “ Place ” nursery, before 
we left the home one, on which we are now engaged, and 
if there is sufficient room at the end of my tale, you shall 
see all the figures and judge for yourself. Meantime we 
must have out with some of their secrets in those ranges 
of pits. In the first place are thousands of cuttings, all 
in pots, of all manner of evergreen shrubs and bushes, 
nothing seems to escape them that way save Arbutus, 
Cedar, Pines, and Firs—not but what they could strike 
them also, but then the time and cost would not pay ; 
there would be no value for value, and nothing from per¬ 
centage ; but every pod and berry, and every seed and 
stone and downing in the way of a seed, be the plant old 
or young, or middle aged, in the progress of our im¬ 
portations of the kind, is saved and sown for some pur¬ 
pose or other, if only to see which is which, or which 
will or will not come true to kind, or go back to another 
kind in any of the steps by which itself has progressed 
here from its own Adam or its Adam and Eve. For, you 
see, this Mr. Darwin has made a wonderful impression 
by his notions of how plants came first into being, and 
how such beings could hold on for so many ages ; or if 
they or some of them did not hold, what was the next 
step; then how that step also was secured, and if not 
secured, what next and next. They have laws, reason, and 
