THE WATERING OF PLANTS. 
33 
worth cultivating as flowers ; but Epiphytes,—or plants which 
adhere to trees, have holdfasts, and not sponglet roots, and derive 
all their stimulus of moisture from the air,—are exceedingly 
numerous. 
The season during which to give water or withhold it, should 
be well known by every florist ; and as that depends on the state 
of the plant in its native locality, the nature of that locality should 
be known. In the case of newly-introduced plants, the florist has 
nothing but this to guide him. He may indeed acquire know¬ 
ledge by experience ; but the experience is dear bought, because 
he is likely to kill a dozen of plants before he finds out the proper 
mode of cultivating one. Up to a period comparatively recent, 
this trial and error was the general and almost the only means of 
arriving at any thing like knowledge of the proper mode of treat¬ 
ing plants ; and so long as this was the case, every place where a 
collection was kept was a sort of vegetable slaughter-house. If 
such was the case among professional cultivators, it must have 
been worse than this among amateurs, especially such as had 
small collections in windows only. When tropical plants became 
pretty numerous, and were generally distributed, very few could 
keep them alive, or even in tolerable condition ; and thus, the 
leaves of shrubs were poor, the plants themselves dwarfed and 
scraggy, the flowers very inferior ; or if the plants lingered in 
existence for a few years, they ceased to flower, then to make 
shoots, and after this they died. If it had been the custom to 
hold inquests on dead flowering plants, the verdict in the great 
majority of cases would have been, “ Found drowned and a 
post-mortem examination by a skilful florist would have led to the 
same conclusion. 
* 
With scarcely one exception, flowering plants have a season of 
repose ; but in a miscellaneous collection this varies much, both 
in length and in the time of the year. Generally speaking, it 
begins soon after the flowering and ripening of the seeds, unless 
in the case of those plants (the Rhododendrons, for instance,) which 
bring forward their flower-buds to a considerably advanced state 
in the autumn. In the majority of flowering plants, the season 
of repose lasts from the ripening of the seeds till the plant begins 
to show signs of growth in another year. The usual order is— 
first, the individual growth of the plant in stems, leaves, and 
shoots, varying according to its habit; but where the flower 
VOL. III. NO. II. F 
