442 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
March 13, 1886. 
STOCK AND SCION. 
An interesting evidence of the power of a stock of 
moderate dimensions may be seen here in the Rose- 
honse. A Mareehal Niel worked upon a Briar as a 
standard was planted, in common with some other 
kinds, about eleven years since. The standard form 
was selected to enable the Roses to be planted outside 
and the heads to be within. The stem of the Briar, 
about 4 ft. in length, is just below the bud-junction 
ins. in circumference. Just above the junction the 
stem has swelled out to the circumference of 6^ ins., 
and higher up, for 6 ft. in length, ere it breaks into 
other branches, the stem is 5f ins. round. It will thus 
be seen that the lesser is maintaining and feeding the 
greater, and there are no evidences of decay in conse- 
sequence, for the plant is very robust and covers a large 
area of the house. 
It is worthy of remark that stocks similar in character, 
upon which such robust-growing kinds as Madame 
Berard and the Noisette, La Marque, are worked, have 
distended much more freely, and also that where—as 
has been the case some three years—Mareehal Niel is 
worked on both these kinds, the distension of the stems 
throughout is more regular and even. It does seem as 
if some good strong grower, such as Madame Berard, 
for instance, forrhed the best secondary stock upon 
which to work the Mareehal, and I anticipate for heads 
so produced longer life than is usually found for our 
premier yellow Rose. Very much has been written 
from time to time as to the best methods of pruning for 
the Mareehal. 
I think it needs very hard pruning to compel it to 
re-make robust growths, for without these annual 
growths fine rich-coloured blooms cannot be looked for. 
As the variety produces almost all its blooms at one 
season, it suffers nothing from severe cutting back the 
moment the bloom is over, and if courage be then 
shown in very hard pruning a fine lot of strong shoots 
will result. Practically, it should be the aim of the 
pruner to cut back growths in alternate seasons ; but 
in all cases pruning early in the summer should be hard, 
to give the head ample time to reproduce plenty of 
strong free-blooming growths. Many a fine head, 
covering a large area, has been ruined just because the 
growers have proved too timid to use the knife freely at 
the proper season.— A. D. 
-- 
ALLOTMENTS. 
As the subject of allotments is now before the 
country, the readers of The Gardening World may 
be interested in hearing that some of the earliest 
allotments in England were little farms in Sussex. 
Several of our parishes recall their origin and early 
settlement in their names. The parish of Billingliurst, 
for example, derives its name from a Norseman and 
rover named Billing, who swooped down upon it with 
his tribe, settled it, divided it into allotments, and 
conferred upon the spot his illustrious name, for the 
Billings were of royal birth. This early division of the 
land and first appearance of allotments took place about 
the year a.d. 500. According to the custom of the 
times, the cultivated land was divided into plots, each 
sufficient for the support of a single family, while the 
rest of the parish remained in waste. As the popula¬ 
tion grew the waste was gradually absorbed, and this 
process has, in fact, gone on throughout the w 7 hole 
period of our history. Population, for various reasons, 
increased very slowly during many centuries. When 
typhoid raged unchecked by any sanitary knowledge or 
care, so that in one year half the population of the 
country was actually destroyed by what was then 
called the “Black Death,” and when small pox, 
unmitigated by Dr. Jenner’s discovery, cleared off the 
people of entire parishes in some years, the increment 
from century to century remained small. 
The total population in John’s reign is said to have 
been two millions. We exported corn in the last 
century, and it was only in the reign of George III. 
that these large enclosures of commons took place, 
which ill-informed writers declare ought never to have 
occurred, while in the same breath they advocate the 
cultivation of existing wastes, which, in point of fact, 
remain so only from the sterility of the soil. The 
existing wastes, the residuum of centuries, worthless 
and still untilled, are naturally connected with the 
subject of allotments, because the Billings, of Bir¬ 
mingham, would seize them and have them farmed as 
small farms, not like the early rovers, at their own 
risk and cost, but at that of the rate-payers or anybody 
except themselves. These plans of compulsory culti¬ 
vation of land, which has gone begging from the year 
500 till now, and of State-assisted small farmers, is, 
perhaps, the coolest scheme which has ever been pro¬ 
pounded. One hardly knows what force there may be 
in a movement of this kind, owing to the exaggeration 
which invariably characterises such agitations. I have 
known associations, quite discredited and insolvent, 
who have gone on puffing their case and still getting 
themselves quoted by the press as associations of great 
authority, till presently, all of a sudden, the wind-bags 
are pricked and you hear of them no more. Let us 
hope it will be so with all schemes for settling poor 
folk on land which Billing, of Sussex, would never have 
touched, and with kindred schemes which would start 
small farming at other people’s expense. And what is 
small farming ? I have seen a great deal of it, and I 
once had the pleasure of inspecting a small farm or 
market garden in the parish of Bermondsey, not two 
miles from London Bridge. 
The chief crops were Celery, Cauliflowers, and 
Asparagus, and although the farming was a very 
-petite, culture, it was undoubtedly profitable both to 
tenant, labourer, and owner. In this case the chief 
essentials to success were manure, and a convenient 
market. The crops just named require twenty times 
as much manure as the Cereals, and as Bermondsey 
supplies abundance of manure, it is evident that in 
such a parish corn growing cannot compete with the 
cultivation of vegetables. I have seen too the pros¬ 
perous farming of the Channel Islands, but the 
conditions are exceptional, and very frequently large 
farming yields a larger amount of produce than Jersey 
or Guernsey. If one case may be set against another, 
the small farming of Shetland is the worst in the 
world, and cannot hold its own against the larger 
farming which some Scotch farmers have introduced in 
recent years. 
In the long run it will be found in England, as it 
has been on the continent, that small farming is the 
method of the least intelligent of agriculturists, and of 
those who possess the smallest capital, and that its 
chances of success have been in modern times greatly 
diminished by the introduction of machinery, which 
small farmers cannot purchase, and by the alliance of 
modern agriculture with sciences, which the education 
of small farmers and their hard lives will not admit of 
their mastering. In spite of exceptional cases, if 
market gardening, town farming, milk walks, poultry 
runs, and the breeding of guinea pigs, or what not, 
small farming must always prove, as it has done 
hitherto as a general system, proportionately more 
costly and less productive than the rival system. 
Those persons, therefore, who maintain that the poverty 
of a dense population would be relieved by resorting to 
small farming and subsidising the labourers for the 
sake of restoring a class they are pleased to admire, 
assert, in point of fact, that a system of agriculture, 
which has always proved the least productive, will be 
found to yield the best results if it be only set on foot 
once more.— II. E. 
--»->=&*«■- 
FISH MANURES. 
It was little more than forty years ago that the first 
importation of Peruvian guano occurred in Scotland. 
Those who remember that event will also remember 
how great was the interest it excited amongst agri¬ 
culturists, how surprised and delighted farmers were to 
find that a cwt. of that substance was more effective 
than a hundred times as much farmyard manure. The 
price was only about £7 per ton, the quality was ex¬ 
cellent, and the supply rvas considered to be almost 
inexhaustible. It came at a time when farmers required 
some encouragement, and marked the beginning of a 
tide of agricultural prosperity. Peruvian guano, as 
imported forty years ago, and for twenty years there¬ 
after, was a very nitrogenous and somewhat soluble 
manure, capable of yielding from 10 to 15 per cent, of 
ammonia, and as much as 10 per cent, of soluble 
phosphate, so that rvhen put on the land it was an im¬ 
mediate and powerful fertiliser. About twenty years 
ago the imports of Peruvian guano attained their 
maximum, and they have since gradually dwindled 
away—the rich deposits of guano are now exhausted, 
and there remain only poor deposits, which in great 
measure will not repay the cost of importing. The 
supplies which still come dropping in are of a different 
kind from those of former times—they are capable of 
yielding little more than 5 per cent, of ammonia, and 
although they are far richer in phosphates, yet these, 
as well as the nitrogenous matter, are of a much less 
soluble kind than formerly. 
To find something that will take the place of a high- 
class Peruvian guano is, of course, a great desideratum, 
and it has been claimed for fish and flesh manures that 
they are the modern representatives of Peruvian guano, 
and the name “ guano ” has, therefore, been applied to 
them. Their composition, so far as total phosphates 
and nitrogenous matters are concerned, lends some 
support to that opinion, but the resemblance is only a 
superficial one. The composition of Peruvian guano 
was a very complicated one, and the constituents were 
of a delicately-balanced kind, capable of easy decompo¬ 
sition in the soil, and the effect of these upon the crop 
was very rapid and precise. A large proportion of the 
phosphates were alkaline, and, therefore, immediately 
soluble, while the nitrogenous matter consisted chiefly 
of ammonia salts or complex soluble substances which 
were rapidly converted into ammonia salts or nitrates, 
and were thus made immediately available for the 
nourishment of plants. “Fish guano,” on the other 
hand, and flesh manures, such as “Frey-Bentos guano,” 
consist of phosphates which are insoluble in water, and 
of nitrogenous matters of an albuminoid kind, which 
are only slowly decomposed in the soil. Before these 
constituents can be used by the plant, they must first 
be dissolved or decomposed, and that is a process which 
takes some time. The insolubility of these manures 
renders them unsuitable for application in circum¬ 
stances where Peruvian guano exerted a powerful 
influence, such as in the forcing away of cereals or 
young grass when applied as a top-dressing. 
These substances are chiefly valuable for broad-cast 
manuring with the view of raising the general fertility 
of the soil, or for application to root crops which have 
a prolonged period of growth. The utility of fish 
guano in these respects has been very clearly demon¬ 
strated at the experimental stations of the Highland 
and Agricultural Society. The fish guano plot has 
gone on steadily improving since the beginning of the 
experiments, and it has been noticed that the Turnip 
crops on that plot have looked fresh and continued 
their growth far on in the season. The only year in 
which a marked deficiency in that plot was manifest 
was in 1884, at the Pumpherston station, when a crop 
of Beans was grown. The very backward state of that 
plot on that occasion pointed out very clearly wherein 
lies the chief deficiency of fish manure. The results 
obtained with the Bean crop exceeded in interest any 
that had occurred before upon the station, and the one 
over-ruling constituent in a Bean manure was shown to 
be potash. All the plots that had potash applied to 
them did well, and those that had the largest dose of 
potash did best, while those that had no potash applied 
to them were a failure. The most notable failure was 
seen in two plots which had been manured with fish 
guano and fish meal. 
It is characteristic of fish manures, that while they 
contain much phosphate and abundance of nitrogenous 
matter, they contain almost no potash. But it is well 
known that the abundance of some fertilising con¬ 
stituents in a manure counts for nothing in the raising 
of a crop if one of the essential constituents of plant 
food is absent, or if the one which the crop requires 
most is present in insufficient amount. “We therefore 
found that the plots manured with fish manures pro¬ 
duced a smaller crop than any other plot save one, and 
that was the plot to which no potash had been applied 
since the beginning of the experiments. 
We thus see that there have been two causes at work 
to lower the value of fish manures in the estimation of 
the farmer; in the first place, he has been led to expect, 
from the misleading name under which it has been sold, 
that it would be a manure resembling in its efficacy 
Peruvian guano, with whose extraordinary fertilising 
power he had been familiar; and, secondly, the almost 
total want of potash, which, though not abundant in 
Peruvian guano, was nevertheless present in that 
manure to the extent of about 3 per cent. 
What, then, is needed in order to make fish manures 
once more attractive to the farmer ? They should be 
sold under a name that does not raise false expectations, 
and they should have potash salts added to them.— Dr. 
A. P. Aitkcn, in The North British Agriculturist. 
