September 27, 1890. 
THE GARDENING WORLD. 
55 
After being sorted, the Onions are put into barrels 
and then brined—that is, a particular brine is poured 
over them—and the barrels are coopered up and 
despatched to the great pickling establishments, such 
as those of Crosse & Blackwell, Pink & Sons, Lazenby, 
and other large firms, who mostly obtain their supplies 
in this way. The Cucumbers and Cauliflowers are 
treated in much the same way, but the Cabbages are 
mostly sent away fresh. This is the mode generally 
adopted by the farmers for disposing of their produce, 
but there is one small factory at Sandy where the 
whole operations of peeling, pickling, and bottling are 
carried out. The proprietor of this establishment 
employs about 120 women all the year round, working 
up not only what is grown on his own farm of 
150 acres, but what is brought from the smaller holders 
and cottagers, nearly all of whom cultivate pickling 
vegetables to some extent.— Daily News. 
-- 
THE HARDY WHITE PASSION 
FLOWER. 
It is rather hard upon this Passion Flower that its 
parentage should be so roughly questioned and disputed, 
for, as Mr. Toole sagely remarks, “ Fathers may be 
hoptional, but mothers is compulsory.” How Mr. 
Napper can now say that “the fate of Mr. Fuller’s 
plant at the Exeter Nursery was the rubbish-heap” 
surpasses my comprehension. Why, he himself wrote 
in the Garden of May 14th, 1887, and, in almost the 
same words, in the Western Times of Exeter, May 11th, 
1887, that “ the original plant ” from which the stock 
was raised was found by him in the court at the rear of 
Mr. Fuller’s dwelling-house at Newton Abbot. The 
selfsame story was given by Messrs. Lucombe, Pince & 
Co. in their circular when they offered the plant. Of 
this there is no possible doubt whatever, for I have the 
circular before me, given me by an amateur who is 
anxious to see fair play in the controversy. This 
circular repeats the version of the origin, quotes the 
letters which had appeared upon the subject, and while 
emphasising the fact that the stock came from Mr. 
Fuller’s plant, never says a word about the private 
garden theory now set afloat by Mr. Napper. Mr. 
Napper knows as well as I do that another stock 
existed of this flower besides Messrs. Lucombe, Pince’s, 
and perhaps he may remember the surprise he felt 
when he discovered the fact. That stock came from 
an unbloomed seedling of the same batch from which 
Mr. Fuller got the plant he sold to Messrs. Lucombe, 
Pince & Co., and it was given as a gift to Mr. 
Nanscawen, the gardener at Whiteway, near Chudleigh. 
This I can vouch for, that the two stocks were identical, 
and were treated as such. When the plant was sent 
out it was described as of an ivory-white colour.— 
Devoniensis. 
-- 
ROUND MY GARDEN. 
It is not a large garden, but it is laid out in the good 
old-fashioned style which I love so well. No prim 
parterres here, filled with fashionable flowers—gaudy 
hybrids of all sorts—no trim walks so cleanly swept 
that you dare not drop your cigar-ash there ; but a 
quaint, comfortable, old-world garden with retired 
dark paths, where the wildings rub shoulders with 
their cultivated brethren ; a garden half kitchen and 
half flower, full of Mint, Pennyroyal, Thyme, Sage, 
Orange Marigolds, Solomon’s Seal, Monkshood, Borage, 
Sweet Pea, Harebell, Canterbury Bells, Flaming 
Pokers, Osmunda, Honeysuckle, and innumerable 
Eoses. Luxuriant Eose sprays idly droop over the 
walks, taking the unwary by the button-hole ere he is 
aware. 
If there is a fault in this garden it is that the blooms 
are too thick, for they jostle each other in the struggle 
for existence. But then the eye is “dazzled and 
drunk with beauty,” so rich and intense is the colour¬ 
ing on all sides. After this sheen and brilliant hues, 
the eye finds refreshment in resting on the fresh green 
of the tennis lawn which occupies the centre of the 
flower garden, and has an umbrageous Medlar tree (the 
finest I have ever seen) on one side. Here repose on 
garden seats the spectators of the tennis contests, and 
here, too, the combatants themselves find a grateful 
resting place after their hotly-contested sets, where 
both sexes display their skill with the racquet, 
“ Whilst summer suns roll unperceived away.” 
We had a curious inmate of this loved garden in the 
shape of a hedgehog, which we found in the stable 
snugly rolled up in an old tennis net, and apparently 
fast asleep. We had to cut the net to shreds to get 
him out, and then turned him into the garden to 
banquet ad lib. on the slugs and snails. But he must 
have donned an “invisible cap,” for I never saw him 
again, though I searched in every nook and corner for 
his highness day after day. I was told yesterday he 
had been found dead in his old retreat, the stable. 
The funny part of the matter is that we must have 
brought him from Eastbourne quite unwittingly, as 
part and parcel of our luggage. It was the first time 
probably that a hedgehog had a free passage per rail 
from Eastbourne to Exeter. This by way of digression. 
In the spring the birds were very busy in our garden, 
and many built their nests there—robins, thrushes, 
blackbirds, chaffinches, greenfinches, and tits are our 
guests all the year round, and in April I now and then 
picked up under the yew hedge that lovely blue egg 
dashed with black, and that streaked dull green one, 
which every schoolboy knows so well. Mostly broken, 
these, by the fall (dropped from the nest or stolen by 
other birds and dropped by them), but sometimes they 
were intact. In merry April and bonny May our 
garden was a veritable concert hall, so full of melody 
was it from dawn to dark, and nothing to pay for a 
front seat under the medlar tree. Then, during April, 
came the summer migrants, the identical birds probably 
who patronised Glencroft last year, including blackcaps, 
whitethroats, redstarts, willow-wrens, fly-catchers, 
&c., &e. I noticed a young redstart of the year about a 
fortnight ago (I am writing on 4th September) on the 
lawn, with his mind evidently full of his impending 
travels, for he was very restless and uneasy. We have a 
large disused old greenhouse in the flower garden, where 
a splendid Marechal Niel trails over the roof inside. The 
willow-warblers (or wrens), sparrows, and other birds 
used to enter where the panes were broken, and I have 
often seen them hard at work amid the lovely yellow 
blooms picking the insects off them. By the way, the 
small green-fly ruined most of these Eoses, reducing 
their blooms to a greenish glutinous state, which made 
it unpleasant to handle them. 
A short time ago, for some reason or other (probably 
they were making forays on the black birds and 
thrushes’ nests), the missel thrushes were constantly 
flying in and out of our garden, screeching angrily all 
day long. I fancy they were having perpetual battles 
with the parent thrushes and blackbirds. These 
stormcocks, as they are called by the country folk, are 
fierce, bold birds, with very hazy notions of meum and 
tuum, I fear ! I need hardly say our fruit and vege¬ 
table garden has been laid under an embargo by the 
feathered thieves, who seem quite as fond of Peas as 
I am, only they take them raw. They must have 
eaten quarts of Easpberries, Strawberries, and Goose¬ 
berries, I should imagine (as they were not netted), 
and the young birds must have been feasted like 
sybarites ! Doubtless they had .indigestion now and 
then. Indigestion during the night watches in a 
closely confined nest! It is too horrible to think of! 
Fancy the gorged nestlings groaning in their spasms, 
and kicking and plunging against each other ! If 
other birds swear, beside parrots, a good many exple¬ 
tives must be let loose at such seasons. 
Now it is September, and the delicious wall fruit 
(Plums, Nectarines, and Peaches) are mellowing day by 
day, very slowly, on the southern wall. I fancy the ousel 
cock digs his golden dagger into them at times, and 
returns for another slice—at any rate the wasps play 
havoc with them, and have been far too sharp for 
the gardener, leaving the ripe fruit in a very unsatis¬ 
factory state indeed. Our Eoses, after early June, seem 
to move in an endless procession, Eoses white as snow, 
damask Eoses, crimson-velvet Eoses, pure pink blooms, 
tawny Eoses, all these grace our garden, and, as fast as 
we pick them, fresh beauties fall into the gaps in the 
ranks. 
We have Eoses galore for the maiden’s snowy bosom, 
and an inexhaustible supply of smart buttonholes for 
the inferior sex. Eealms of Eoses are our3, and who 
could wish for a more beautiful kingdom ? There are 
more unpleasant things than strolling down a wild 
garden walk, with a bevy of white and red Eoses on 
one hand, and ripening Plums in all the glory of 
purple bloom on the other, and this the lucky writer 
can do any day. A little further on we come to a 
veritable gold-mine in the shape of a goodly patch of 
yellow Stonecrop, which, gold-like, melts only too 
rapidly away. Then, fairy-like London Pride (Saxi¬ 
frage) woos us, and beyond is the herb garden. The 
fresh, sweet aromatic scent of herbs is here, and here, 
too, I love to linger. 
Know ye not the old-world garden where the splendid 
Salvia pratensis rears its crest of dark blue by the side 
of the delicate Spearmint, and the herb Marjoram '! 
Know ye not the secluded spots in the kitchen garden 
where Thyme with its lovely pink flowers flings its 
fragrance to the breeze all the live-long summer 
day, and where Eue and Kosemary (both dear to the 
maiden and the muse) remind one of “the golden 
days” when they were far more in favour in Merry 
England than they are now ? Oliver "Wendell Holmes 
speaks of the marvellous powers of association that lie 
in the sense of smell in his Autocrat of the Breakfast 
Table. A single whiff of sweet Lavender, Thyme, or 
Spearmint is the mystic key that unlocks the gate of a 
paradise of old memories, when long forgotten faces 
associated with our early childhood rise from the mists 
of the past, and we glide backward down the river of 
years to be a restless elf in a soiled pinafore once more. 
The old store room in the ancient country house 
where dried bunches of Lavender and sweet Marjoram 
lay half hidden amid the innumerable confections, and 
the bottles of Orange flower water, distilled Peppermint, 
Ginger cordial and Cowslip wine—this old room, I say, 
is once again before our eyes, and we are moving 
through it on tip-toe from treasure to treasure in deadly 
fear of our stately but stern grandmother, who does not 
allow us within these sacred precincts ! 
These are the old memories that come back to me a3 
I stroll backwards and forwards between the beds of 
aromatic herbs, breathing again the spirit of the past as 
I drink in their delicious odours. This to me is the 
pleasantest spot in our garden, and the one where I 
linger longest. When the Sage is fading there is a 
lovely rough blue bloom on the leaves and stems, as, 
no doubt, most of my readers have observed. But 
“Our Garden,” like every other earthly paradise, is 
not exempt from the ills and annoyances of life, and 
as I muse in a golden day-dream under the Medlar 
tree, my deep reveries are often broken up by the shrill 
whistle of some errand boy entering the Couit, or the 
loud unmusical tones of the butcher's lal on the 
subject of prime chops and tender steaks ! Thus am I 
brought back from my fairyland to this prosaic earth of 
ours at a single bound ! The tax collector also finds 
his way even into this bower of bliss, and will not be 
denied ! From realm! of Eoses to rashers of bacon is a 
long way, but these little contretemps are inevitable 
even in such an earthly paradise and drowsy land of 
day-dreams as “Our Garden.”— F. B. D., Exeter, in 
The Western Times. 
- ->*<• -- 
“MANORIAL VALUE.” 
Manurial value is a term used by chemists to express 
the amount of nitrogen that may be present. Now I 
do not doubt the ability of chemists to make a quan¬ 
titative estimation of nitrogen, nor their power of 
informing farmers of the extent to which they may or 
may not have been cheated when they purchased 
artificial manures. I would humbly suggest, however, 
that the real practical manurial value depends, not 
only upon the amount of plant-food present, but also 
upon whether the plant-food is present in a form in 
which it can be digested and exhaustively utilised by 
the plant. For the latter information, which is of the 
highest importance, I would sooner apply to a practical 
farmer or gardener than to a chemist. 
A chemist, for instance, who had regard to his 
analyses and nothing else, might tell us that nut¬ 
shells had a certain dietetic value ; but ordinary men 
and Monkeys know better than that. He might tell 
us that gin was richer in certain dietetic ingredients 
than ginger beer, but we know that ginger beer is the 
better article of diet. Again, guano has a far higher 
manurial value than rich garden mould—such as is got 
by mixing earth with organic refuse—but if we do not 
dilute our guano to the same level, so to say, as our 
rich garden mould we may kill our plants. To declare 
that rich garden mould is of low manurial value is 
absurd, because we know that in it plants of all 
kinds reach the highest development which is attainable. 
Farmers and market gardeners will tell you that 
artificial manures have got no bottom in them, that 
their use is, so to say, a speculation ; and if climatic 
conditions are unfavourable when the artificials are 
applied, the money spent on them is lost for ever. 
With organic refuse, however, the case is entirely 
different, and the effect of the application of organic 
matter, especially of human origin, to the soil is plainly 
discernible for three or four years. Solid organic 
matter cannot be washed away ; it nitrifies slowly, and 
doles out the nitrates to the roots of the plants in 
proportion as they are needed.— From an Address 
delivered by Dr. G. V. Poore at the British Sanitary 
Congress. 
