48 
THE FLORIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
supplied from the nursery of one of the largest growers in the south, the 
mention of whose name would be a sufficient guarantee that they were all that 
could be desired as far as health, robustness, and proper working could make 
them; and therefore we may fairly start with this premise, that whatever has 
gone wrong with them must either have been the fault of my method of culti¬ 
vation, or have arisen from causes beyond my control. 
My Rose-bed is situated in a very warm and sheltered jiosition. When 
first planted the soil, which is a yellow loam, was trenched 2 feet deep, and 
liberally supplied with a dressing of rotten manure and scrapings from the 
roadside. The plants when received were remarkably strong and vigorous, but 
the shoots, being of very rapid growth, were necessarily pithy, and therefore 
not so well able to withstand the severe pruning that newly planted Roses must 
undergo. One that was particularly pithy, Eveque de Nimes, died without 
starting a bud ; but the remainder, having been mulched with half-rotten dung 
and liberally watered, managed to grow on, and bloomed in the summer pretty 
well. Unfortunately, however, with continued drought came a lack of water, and 
as a matter of necessity they had to be left to shift for themselves as best they 
could, and as a consequence I got scarcely any autumn bloom. During the ensuing 
winter, I forked in a good dressing of manure, and, after pruning, a top-dressing 
of soil from an old Cucumber-bed. The early part of the last summer, not 
having been so dry as the preceding one, I had a very fair amount of bloom ; 
but the hot month of September once more exhausted our waterworks, and 
carried death and desolation into the midst of my Rose-bed ; several were quite 
dead, others too far gone ever to make good plants again; and not one of those 
worked on the Manetti was anything to boast of. 
Now, after this paragraph of failures has been read, I shall be asked, I 
imagine, “ Did you bury the stock in the soil ? ” To this I reply, Yes. “ How 
did you prune ? ” Hard the first year, and sparingly afterwards ; as they never 
produced growth at all equal to what they did at the nursery. “ Did you mulch 
the roots ? ” Yes. “Then how about moisture?” Well, really, this is my 
weak point, for situated as my garden is upon the saddle of a ridge, with a fall 
on either side, having from 2 to 3 feet of soil on the surface, with 12 feet of 
gravel under that, and where the water in the wells falls from 6 feet in winter 
to 36 at midsummer, some of them becoming quite dry by August—it must be 
confessed that I am not cultivating the Rose under the most favourable circum¬ 
stances, especially -when worked on the Manetti. 
Now, I have not written this much simply for the purpose of depreciating 
the character of the Manetti as a stock. I have no doubt that in some situa¬ 
tions it is all that can be desired; but this can only be where the soil is well 
adapted to it. All Roses do not do badly with me ; because I have growing 
on their own roots a large number that have done remarkably well, and 
promise, at the present time, an abundance of bloom next summer. Among 
the Roses which I had from the nursery were a few on their own roots— 
viz., John Hopper, Beauty of Waltham, and others; these were planted in 
the same bed with others on the Manetti, and they have thriven in a way that 
affords a marked contrast to the latter. But the most direct confirmation of 
my belief that Roses on their own roots succeed better than those on the 
Manetti in dry soils, is to be found in a row of the former which I planted in 
the hottest situation in my garden, from whence I had previously grubbed out 
an old Laurel hedge; they were a mixed collection of Bourbons and Hybrid 
Perpetuals of my own striking, and the strong and redundant growth which 
they made in the course of the first season after planting, under even a less 
generous treatment than those on the Manetti received, has astonished as much 
as delighted me. I had some very fine blooms from these, especially in the 
