86 THE FLORIST. 
reach forth recklessly to seize your prey—O belles and beaux, so 
charming, so amiable, and so profoundly ignorant on the subject of 
plants! Pause awhile, I beseech you, and stay your ruthless hands, for 
you know not what fatal mischief you may do. One little snip with those 
sharp ‘ Rose nippers,” and you may destroy in a moment the pleasant 
hopes of a skilful taste, and the just reward of a patient industry. You 
may ruin the symmetry of a plant for ever; and behold hereafter an 
unsightly dwarf, when you might have gazed upon a glorious Life 
Guardsman. What should you say, fair lady, were some disagreeable 
miscreant to intrude upon the privacy of your bright little boudoir, and 
to extract the tail of your piping bullfinch 2? And you, my brave gentle- 
man, would your observations be entirely such as your pastor would 
approve, were you to hear from your groom that some coarse-minded 
person had paid your stables a visit during the night, and gone the 
whole hog with your hunter’s manes ? 
There is provocation, I must allow, sometimes. There are Spades 
in the floricultural pack, though not in our company (limited), so mean 
as to the amount, and so sulky as to the manner of their donations, 
that their scared employers, dare not, finally, ask for a single petal, and 
so are led to adopt the facile alternative of freely helping themselves. 
But how comes it, the question may arise, that the young Oxonian, 
of whom we heard just now as at fierce war with gardeners, and as 
cutting and maiming the plants around him with so much bruta 
stolidity, how comes it that he has suddenly put off the paraphernalia 
of battle for the peaceful apron of the florist, and changed his sword 
into a pruning knife ? * 
Of this transformation, the happiest event of my life, I must speak 
hereafter; appropriately, I think, in a little lecture upon Roses, which 
I am preparing at the request of ‘The Six of Spades;” but I must 
first introduce you to the rest of our brotherhood; and now, if you 
please, to that quaint, hearty, hard-working, plain-speaking, cheery 
fellow, Joseph Grundy, head gardener, coachman, &c., &e., to the good 
old ladies at the Grange. 
S. RB. H. 

CULTURE OF THE APPLE. 
Tue Apple tree thrives best in a soil that is neither too dry nor too 
moist. In hot sandy soils it is apt to canker; wet subsoils occasion 
disease, and are frequently indicated by the trees becoming overgrown 
with Moss. The ground for an Apple plantation should therefore be 
well drained ; so that if holes are dug out to the depth of at least three 
feet, water will not spring up in them. All land-springs should be cut 
off; spring water being much colder than the summer rains. Moistened 
by the latter, the trees grow vigorously; but spring water chills the 
roots with which it is allowed to remain in contact, and the warm sap 
that returns from the leaves to increase the roots, being checked by the 
cold when it approaches them, the formation of good roots is prevented ; 
and without these the trees cannot thrive. rs 

