188 
DOUBLE STOCKS. 
The shades may now be got in requisition, and if any repairs 
or painting is wanted among them, let it be done at once; keep 
a close watch upon the earwigs, against which there is no better 
remedy than an examination of the traps every morning. 
Florista. 
DOUBLE STOCKS. 
Good handsome double stocks never fail to attract notice, and 
excite admiration wherever they are seen ; every gardener desires 
to have them, and yet how frequent the failures. I am a great 
admirer of these flowers, and annually bestow great pains upon 
them, though with such variable 'results as to reduce the result to 
a mere chance ; sometimes I succeed in obtaining splendid flowers, 
and again in the succeeding year they are nearly all single. 
There is certainly a mystery about this particular branch of 
floriculture, in which others are not involved. For instance, it 
is a well-known fact, though to me utterly inexplicable, that the 
same seed under the management of one person shall produce 
nearly all double flowers, while with another individual the 
produce will be almost totally single. The London seedsmen 
might furnish the horticultural world with a fund of amusement, 
were they to keep a register of the very opposite accounts re¬ 
ceived from their customers of the very same sample of seed: 
here it is excellent, there a total failure; and these very different 
results seem to be incapable of explanation. 
A few years ago I received from a friend a few plants of 
Brompton stocks, from which I had a fair proportion of double 
flowers, while those of my friend were nearly all single, although 
he planted perhaps ten times as many. This seed was sown 
early in spring, and in the autumn the plants were, in my opinion, 
much too luxuriant; this I confess might have been the result 
of prejudice, as it had been my invariable practice for many 
years to sow my biennial stock seen in July, without once sus¬ 
pecting that my frequent failures might possibly be attributable 
to that circumstance. 
Some eight or ten years since, I possessed a collection of 
