"^-.;^^ .■fe>' Book ,r\ R x^^ ^^••'5^'^ A^ .-ij^^-li V'Mm kl^ ,. ^S^c Who in our days does not love flowers, and who does not like to do a little gardening? Assuredly, not you nor I, dear reader, nor any of our acquaintance. But the love of flowers, the taste which of all others affords the greatest amount of elegant and harmless pleasure, is by many deemed to be an unfortunate one, seehig that it is out of their poAver to indulge it. In your case, sir, for instance, the burden of busi- ness, oftentimes a terribly heavy one, Avhich it is not in your power to shake off', absolutely forbids a residence in the country. And, in yours, my dear lady, the duty of watching over your young family obliges you to remain in the city. Others of your friends, who share your taste for flowers, are condemned to a sedentary existence, for the want of that most precious of all possessions — health. Time was when a few favored individuals possessed w'hat was (3) 4 PREFACE. called a garden in the interior of the city ; but, at best, those gardens had, as a celebrated wit expressed it, " the shut-up smell." But nowa- days nothing of the kind is to be found ; the opening of a street, the laying out of a square, has dispossessed them of the pent-up treasure, or else the ground has become of such value for building purposes, that it is sold at so much the square foot — a price sufficient almost to cover it with gold. Nor is this the case with the capital alone ; other cities less crowded, all towns, in fine, of sufficient consequence to grow, will soon be without a single garden, large or small, within their limits ; the flower, van- quished, retreats before the building stone. Happily it is not indispensable to possess a garden, either large or small, in order to have flowers, and to enjoy the tranquil delight af- forded by the attentions one bestows upon them, and which one experiences in watching the various phases of their development. Suppose yourself, for instance, after a severe illness, confined to your room by a long conva- lescence, which it is not in the power of any one to abridge. Even if you were the owner of a garden, you would then only admire its flowers at a distance, through your window panes. PREFACE. Then it is that you would feel all the value of a chamber-garden, the flowers of which could be renewed at small cost every fcAV weeks ; taking care to admit into it those only which, from the delicacy of their perfume, or their absence of smell, would be sure not to be injurious to your health. Suppose this enforced seclusion to have be- gun in the month of May, a season at which a garden possesses the greatest attractions ; sup- pose your circumstances such as to forbid your indulging in the luxury, little expensive as it is, of a flower-stand ; in that case, here is a re- ceipt for gardening without earth, without water, without so much as a flower pot even ; in a word, without any expenditure beyond a mere trifle. Procure from a gardener a fresh bunch of a thick-leaved plant, named rhodiola rosea, in English the houseleek, that will cost you at most a few cents. At the beginning of June the stalks of the rhodiola are garnished along their whole length with fleshy leaves, and ter- minated by a bunch of buds, as yet but little developed, and disposed in a corymb. Drive into a wall two hooks, about half a yard apart in a horizontal line ; and upon this support lay the stalk of rhodiola, without tying it in any b PREFACE . part. This is all that is requisite for a cu- rious experiment in parlor gardening, which cannot fail to awaken your interest and afford you amusement. Nature having endowed the rhodiola with the faculty of living, drawing its nourishment from the air alone, which it de- composes by means of its leaves, you will see it day by day, hour by hour, lengthen, turning upwards at the end where the floAver buds are, and dropping its leaves at the lower part of the stalk, where they will dry up and fall off", one by one, while those of the upper part will pre- serve their freshness and become more numer- ous. Finally, it will bloom and present you with a bunch of rose-colored flowers as per- fectly developed as if the plant had grown in good earth constantly watered. When these flowers have faded, cut them off"; and cut off" also the lower part of the stalk. After this preparation, plant it in a pot filled with ordinary garden earth, which you must take care not to water too often. In this situa- tion your stalk of rhodiola Avill take root, and Avill, before autumn, form a tuft of young shoots which will all bloom the following year, and sup- ply you amply with the means to repeat the ex- periment just described. PREFACE. 7 The rhodiola is called by the French St. John's herb. You will wish to knoAv, perhaps, my dear lady, the reason for this name. We will cheerfully satisfy your curiosity. In many parts of France the rhodiola grows abundantly on the outskirts of the woods, and there the experiment of its flowering without earth and without water is repeated every year in almost every peasant's cottage. If it blooms before the feast of St. John the Baptist, (the 24th of June,) they draw from this circumstance a favorable augury with regard to the success of a project or the accomplishment of a wish. In the contrary case, the presage is regarded as unfavorable. I must not omit to add, that this, which, in the middle ages, had truly all the reality and power of superstition, is now no longer any thing more than an amusement of young girls, in whom the oracle of St. John's herb inspires no more confidence than that of the w^hite daisy. Should it so happen that you Avish to do a little gardening in your room, without being able to afford even the very small expense that the purchase of a bunch of rhodiola requires, — a thing which may happen to any one, — spend nothing at all. Ask some kind acquaintance to 8 PRETACE. procure for you a tuft of the yellow seduin, (stone-crop.) It is a very pretty wild plant, which bears, in place of leaves, little green ex- crescences elegantly set into one another. Each stalk forms part of a tuft composed of a great number of stems coming out from a common centre, and each bears on its top some star- shaped flowers of a beautiful golden yellow. Fix a strong pin into the wall paper of your chamber, and hang a tuft of stone-crop to it by a thread, which you must take care not to tie too tight. In a few days the stalks will curve upwards and stand upright, and the flower buds will all open exactly as if the plant had not been taken from the place where it flrst grew. You see now that there are flowers for every body without exception ; and of this you Mill become more fully convinced if you will only peruse, with a little indulgent attention, my Parlor Gardening. CONTENTS PART I. THE GARDEN IN THE APARTMENT. CHAPTER I. Divisions of the Work, 11 CHAPTER IT. The Mantelpiece Garden, 20 CHAPTER III. The Etagere Garden. 31 CHAPTER IV. The Flower stand Garden, 44 CHAPTER V. The Portable Greenhouse, 55 CHAPTER VI. Slips in the Portable Greenhouse — Cold or Hot, 65 10 CONTENTS. CIIAPTEH YII. Grafts in the Portable Greenhouse, . CHAPTER VIII. The House Aquarium, • PART II. THE GARDEN AT THE WINDOW. CHAPTER IX. The Garden upon the Balcony, 96 CIJAPTER X. The Garden upon the large Balcony, ... lio CHAPTER XI. The Garden upon the Terrace, 120 CHAPTER XII. Fruits upon the Terrace, 129 CHAPTER XIII. The Double Window, 143 Conclusion, 150 THE PARLOR GARDENER, PART I. THE GARDEN IN THE APARTMENT. CHAPTER I. Divisions of the Work. — Part I. The Garden in the Room. — Part II. The Garden at the Window. —Watering. — Temper- ature of tlie Water for Watering. — Effect of Cold Water upon Plants cultivated in a Room. —Warmth. — Advantages of the Heat being equal Night and Bay. — Light. — Ventilation. — Cleaning of Broad-leaved Plants. — Same of Narrow-leaved. Divisions of the "Work. IT IS not always easy to cultivate ornamental plants in an inhabited room ; but, far from complaining of this difficulty, we should, on the contrary, congratulate ourselves on it, for it is a great pleasure to do a difficult thing and suc- (11) 12 THE PARLOR GARDENER. ceed in it. To be successful in parlor garden- ing, nothing is requisite but care and patience : much of these is necessary, and so much the bet- ter — this sort of gardening belonging pecviliarly to those who have a great deal of leisure. The extent to which parlor gardening can be carried on, the kinds and variety of plants that it may embrace, the times of the year in which we can occupy ourselves in it with the most pleasure and success, — all this varies according to the space we have, and the fitness of the situation for our experiments. We shall take into consideration all these things, as they present themselves in the natural course of ordinary life. That we may arrange our hints in some order, we will exam- ine separately the garden in the room and the garden at the wmdoio — these being the two natu- ral divisions of this treatise. In Part I. separate chapters are devoted to the garden on the mantel-piece, the garden on the etagere, that on the flower-stand, and that in the portable greenhouse. The different methods of propagation — by seeds, by slips, and by grafts — are the subjects of so many separate chapters. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 13 They are the most delicate and the most amusing of the operations of parlor gardening. This Part will terminate by details on the parlor aqnarium. In Part II. gardening is considered under all the aspects that it can present — on the veranda, between the double Avindows, (which will be converted into a miniature conservatory,) and on the terrace, (which, even when it is not very large, can be made into a real garden,) where we can have flowers all the year round, in less num- ber, doubtless, but as beautiful and as various as in a well-kept parterre. GENERAL D I K E C T I O N S . "Watering. In order to cultivate ornamental plants with success in a room, we must reflect that they have their wants and their enemies ; and we must sat- isfy the one and protect them from the other. Plants confined within our dwellings have need of earth suited to their temperaments ; and it is easy to procure it. They require also watering ; 14 THE PARLOR GARDENER. some rarely and sparingly, others often and pro- fusely, but always with water of the same tem- perature as that of the earth in which they are placed — this being a very important point, upon which most people who have flowers in pots in their chambers are perfectly ignorant. You ladies lilce a comfortable degree of warmth ; so also do your plants ; and nothing is more agreeable, and at the same time more healthy, than a good tem- perature within doors when the cold reigns with- out. Yet, mark what frequently happens : Some beautiful camellia is your delight. To judge by the profusion of buds with which it is loaded, it promises a splendid bloom in January. You have been enjoined not to fail to water it evening and morning, and this injunction you punctually ful- fil. But in what way ? You go to the dining room sideboard for the water pitcher — you find it empty — you have it replenished from the fil- ter — the temperature of this water is almost icy . — you pour it upon the roots of your camellia. Suppose some one was to pour icy water upon your feet — the shock would make you cry out. Your camellia says nothing, but it does not suffer THE PARLOR GARDENER. 15 less. Its sap, that was in full activity, slackens — stops ; and, that it may begin to flow again, all the buds drop, one after another — not a single one can bloom. You are astonished at this, and say, "It is not my fault." In Sir Walter Scott's «' Pirate," the gardener of the Shetland Isles is surprised that his apple trees have frozen. He says, as you would say, "It is not my fault; I watered them all the winter — with warm water." It is the same error reversed. Remember, then, that in watering any plant whatever, cultivated in a pot in a room, the first requisite is, that the water you use be of the same temperature with the earth in which the plant grows. If you have occasion to visit a greenhouse, and it should happen that you pay a little attention to the manner in which it is managed, you M'ill re- mark that it always contains a reservoir of water intended to water the plants with. This water, from the cu'cumstance alone of its remaining in the greenhouse, takes the same temperature with it before it is used. This is an example that must be followed. In the evening, place in the chamber a vessel containing the quantity of water neces- 16 THE PARLOR GARDENER. sary to -water the plants next morning ; this water and the earth of the pots will be of the same temperature. "Warming. As to heat, that is not M'hat is most important for the health of your plants ; the greater num- ber of those which you can have in cold weather will always be warm enough in your house, pro- vided it does not freeze there. The essential point is, that they should not pass by sudden alterna- tions from heat to cold, and that there should be as little difference as possible between the temper- ature of night and day. In this respect it is not difficult to give them satisfaction, while at the same time you are making yourself comfortable. Light. But there is another element of which they all have as much need as of heat ; that is light. Do not be afraid of inconveniencing yourself a little, of spoiling the symmetrical arrangement of your furniture, in order that your flower-stand may re- ceive as much light as possible, and be placed as near to where it comes in as the gardeners by pro- THE PARLOR GARDENER. 17 fession say ought to be done, and as they do in their greenhouses. If you travel in Belgium, in Holland, in the north of Germany, a country ■where parlor gardening is very much, in repute, you will see that all who have flowers in thoir rooms (and every body has) place them conspic- uously upon Hagtres painted green, which gives to entire streets the appearance of a floral exhibi- tion. There is a street in Brussels, where, if you wdsh to see a continual display of gardening and botany, you have nothing to do but to walk along and look at the windows on each side. And you might, in your walk, get some useful hints with regard to the kinds of ornamental plants you wish to cultivate in your parlor. Ventilation. After water, heat, and light, the continual re- newal of air for your plants is most necessary. If your room is warmed by a good open fireplace, which draws well and gives you a clear fire with- out smoke, so much the better ; the draught of the chimney renews sufficiently the air of the apartment : both your own health and that of 2 18 THE PARLOK GARDENER. the plants must be the better for this. Do not put your plants in a room in which the chimney- smokes ; or in a place warmed by a stove or fur- nace ; they will have too little air in this latter ease. You will say, that, in the greenhouses and conservatories it is by various systems of warming- jnpes that a proper temperature is kept up ; and that the plants do well. This is true ; but along- side of the heat pipes are pipes for ventilation, bringing continually into the greenhouse the air from without, which is warmed by its contact with the heat pipes before it mixes with the in- terior air ; and the freshness of this interior air is thereby maintained. Not so in a chamber warmed by a stove. Cleaning. Plants in a room have really but one enemy — the dust necessarily raised by sweeping. Those plants, as the camellias, kalmias, and rhododen- drons, which have leaves both large and thick enough for the process, ought to be wiped at least twice a week with a moistened sponge. As to those Avhose leaves are too small to admit of this sort of cleaning, as the ericas (heaths) and the THE PARLOR GARDENER. 19 epacrls,* you must proceed in the following man- ner : Fill a watering pot, the rose of which has very fine holes, with water of a proper temper- ature ; incline each pot containing a plant to be cleaned separately over the sink, and then with the watering pot, turning the plant round all the time in every direction, pour a fine shower, which will have all the effect of a real rain. By this means you avoid wetting the earth of the pots to excess, and the plants will be perfectly freed from dust. These general attentions are applicable to all plants that can be cultivated in doors. * The epacris is a New Holland shrub, which the first settlers mistook for a kind of heath, and which is still called heath in Aus- tralia, where the true heath (enca) is unknown. — Mrs. Loudon's Ladies' Companion to the Flower Garden, edited by A. J. Down- ing. 20 THE PARLOR GARDENER, CHAPTER II. THE MANTEL-PIECE GARDEN. Plants which will do for it. — Choice of Flower Bulbs. — Hyacinths blooming under the Water. — Disposition of the Vases for this Experiment. — Planting the Bulbs. — Hyacinthsforced, in Water. — Jonquil. — Crocus. — Van Tholl Tulips. — Flower Pots for the Garden on the Mantel-piece. — Care of the Bulbs after Flowering. — Separating the Tufts of Crocus. — Vanilla Tussilago.* — Hepat- icas. YOU HAVE no idea, ladies, of the amount of instructive and agreeable hints I am to give you in this chapter : its title is not in the least deceptive ; you can really make for yourself a garden, without any other place at your disposal than your mantel-piece. I take for granted, that you will begin in good time to kindle your fires, and that they will be kept up until spring has fully taken possession of the outer atmosphere. On this condition, there will be no disappoint- ment for you. in the resources that your garden on the mantel-piece will afford. * Tussilago — coltsfoot. Vanilla tussilayo is probably the tussi- lago fragrans. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 21 Choice of Flowering Bulbs. By the end of September, the evenings in some of the states are cool ; a little fire is indispensable after sunset. It is now time to procure good roots of hyacinths, crocuses, Yan Tholl tulips, and jonquil. You must not choose the largest among these bulbs, which are not always the best by a great deal ; but those of medium size of ;heir species — firm, smooth, shining, free from spots or bruises, and from softness. Those which give premature signs of vegetation ought to be re- jected. A Hyacinth blooming under W ater. Having made your choice among the brightest shades of blue, red, and yellow, you must give your greatest care to a charming experiment which will be the source of a very agreeable amusement for you all the winter. You can procure, at a small expense, two vases of plain, clear, uncol- ored glass ; both of the same form, except that one has no bottom, and is a little smaller than the other. Thev are to be used as follows : Put into TL THE rA.RLOR GARDENER. the one that is open at both ends one of the fin- est of your hyacinth roots ; suppose you take one of a fine red — a sultan Soliinan for instance ; place this bulb in a position inverse to its natural position, that is, Avith the bottom up, and the top, from "which the leaves and flowers are to come, down-wards, even with the orifice at the bottom of the vase. Then you must crumble a mixture of good garden earth and leaf mould over the bulb until the vase is three quarters full. A second bulb with a flower in strong contrast to the first, say a blue if the flower of the first is red, and vice versa, must be next placed in the vase, so that the top shall be even with the upper orifice. You have nothing more to do than to place the vase thus prepared upon the first vase, full of water. Two similar couples look very well, placed upon the two ends of the mantel-piece of a room in which people habitually sit, and where, conse- quently, fire is constantly made while the cold season lasts. The earth in the upper vase should be moderately watered as soon as the bulbs are placed in it, and then kept constantly moist, THE PARLOR GARDENER. 23 avoiding excess, by renewed watering whenever you perceive that the earth is getting dry. At the end of two days, the crowns of the two bulbs will both send out straight, white roots ; those of the reversed bulb turn down in curves, but do not fulfil their functions worse for that. Very soon the two bulbs placed in a contrary position to each other put forth leaves — the one into the air, the other in the water ; then you will see appear in the midst of the transparent liquid the buds on the floral stalk, and finally the flowers, as beautiful, as well formed, of as rich a color, surrounded by leaves of as fine a green as the corresponding parts possess, of the other flower planted in the ordinary manner, and vegetating and developing in the air, its natural element. It is true that time is neces- sary for all this to be accomplished : bulbs planted in October will flower fully in Febru- ary or March ; but is it not a pleasure to watch day by day the phases of their development, above all that of the hyacinth which ends by blooming in the water, head downwards ? 24 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Hyacinths forced in Water. While these curious phenomena in vegetation are being accomplished, you should place other hyacinth roots in bulb glasses, either blue or col- orless, of the form adapted to this purpose, which you must not fail to keep constantly filled with water, so that the liquid shall be even with the crown — that is, with the edge of the flat part of the bulb — without ever passmg it. For filling these glasses, as for watering the earth Avhere the bulbs grow one above the other, one upright and the other reversed, — remember that you must use only water of the temperature of your room. Without this precaution you will spoil all, and the bloom of your bulbs will be miserable. Jonquil — Crocus. The roots of the jonquil should be treated like the hyacinth roots, — using pure water. As you cannot count with certainty on the blooming of all roots, it is prudent to put at least three in the same glass — placing them on a flat, thin, round piece of wood with three holes cut in it. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 25 They bloom at the same time with the hyacinths. In the spaces between the glasses containing the bulbous plants nourished by nothing but water, place pots full of earth, mixed half and half with garden manure ; leaf mould would not be strong enough. Plant in these crocus bulbs, taking care to group in the same pot the varieties of fine col- ors — pure Avhite, white striped with violet, and plain violet. The flowers of these plants, which precede the development of their leaves, contrast agreeably, by the vividness of their colors, with the pale yellow of the jonquil. Van Tholl Tulips. Other pots like the first, and filled with the same mixture, must have in them roots of the Van Tholl tulips, a charming little tulip with a dwarf stem and petals of a bright red bordered with golden yellow. All these flowers develop at the same time, presenting a happy variety of. forms and shades in the bloom of a mantel-piece garden, whilst Nature is at work without, pre- paring her more abundant supply of flowers in the open air. 26 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Flower Pots for the Mantel-piece Garden. Whatever may be your taste for elegance, be- lieve in the experience of an old gardener, and never plant your crocuses and Van Tholl tulips on your mantel-piece in any thing else than the ordinary earthenware flower pots, which cost a few cents, varying in price according to their size. Conceal their coarse surfaces with cover- ings of glazed paper, folded and cut at their upper edge, and place under each pot a porcelain saucer ; and this is the utmost extent you can be permitted to go in sacrifices to elegance. If you plant these poor bulbs in rich vases of var- nished sheet iron or porcelain, painted and gilt, they will languish, and your hopes will be com- pletely deceived ; for they will bloom badly, or not bloom at all. The porous nature of the ordi- nary earthenware flower pots is perfectly well adapted to the vegetation of the roots of orna- mental plants. If you place these roots in iron or porcelain, you will not obtain, however sed- ulous your care, any satisfactory result ; no more in the garden on the mantel-piece than elsewhere. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 27 Care of Bulbs after the Bloom is over. Bulbs which have vegetated in water do not necessarily perish after blooming. Do not wait until their leaves turn yellow and fade before you take them out of the water. When you have done this, let them drip well ; cut off the fibrous roots, the leaves, and the flower stalk, and place them in a drawer where they will be protected from moisture. The next year, those which have not turned soft should be planted in earth, out in the open air, that they may recover if they have strength enough to do so, or to give offsets or young bulbs to replace them in time. The bidbs Avhich were planted in earth will not have suf- fered in any manner from having been forced in the mantel-piece garden. Before taking them out of the earth, you must wait iintil their leaves are half turned yellow after they have bloomed ; then let them lose, by drying in the air, a part of the moisture they had while vegetating ; after which clean them and put them away with the others ; they v/ill serve perfectly a second or third time for the same sort of culture. 28 THE PARLOR GARDENER, If you like crocuse?, — and if you do not, you are too hard to please, for there is not a spring flowering plant fresher or prettier than the cro- cus, — you must continue to water them after the bloom. Their leaves, of a fine green marked throughout their length with a white line, will not be amiss as part of the decoration of your mantel-piece garden. When the leaves begin to turn yellow, you must cease entirely to water them ; but you must not take up the crocus roots. They must be left in the dry earth until next year. They will keep there very well, sur- rounded by their young family ; for they pro- duce every year a certain number of little ones, which will bloom in their first spring. These bulbs ought only to be taken up every three years, and then for the purpose of separating the clusters ; without which the pots would be too full — there would not be nourishment for the whole famil)'. When managed in this manner, the tufts of forced crocuses are more beautiful the second year than the first, and still more beautiful the third year ; after which you must reneAV the plantings. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 29 The very easy gardening, of which we have just described the process, will bring you to the fine weather ; and then, if you go to the country to pass the summer, the mantel-piece may remain widowed of its garden until autumn. But if you remain, you may put upon the mantel-piece some of your prettiest flowers, whenever you have too many for your balcony. They will there require attentions of which we will tell you in the part of this work particularly devoted to the garden at the window. Vanilla Tussilago — Hepaticas. Has your mantel-piece room enough to admit of two or three supplementary pots ? Then put there — if you arc not afraid of sweet, penetrating perfumes, a pot of vanilla tussilago. The flower is ugly, but of an odor equal to that of the sweet- est orchises, and it does not affect the head. If you are afraid of odors, even the delicate and inofi'.'nsive, substitute for the vanilla tus- silago rose-colored and blue hepaticas, which are charming in form and color, and have no per- fume. With these resources there is abundant 30 THE PARLOR GARDEXER. material to give you a taste for the culture of flowers in the mantel-piece garden. The vanilla tussilago and the hepatica are flowers of a most accommodating disposition ; nothing more is ne- cessary to them than half a glass of water every two days, and for the temperature of your cham- ber to be such as suits yourself. THE PARLOR GARDE XER. 31 CHAPTER III. THE ETAGi:RE GARDEN. Gardening on the Etagere. — Succulent Plants. — Peculiarities of their Organization. — Dwarf Succulent Plants. — Quantity of Earth of wliich they have need. — Aliments that they draw from the Air. — Cactus. — Opuntias, (Prickly Pear.) — Melo- cacti, (Melon Thistle.) — Echinocacti.* — llow the Goats of Jamaica make them drop their thorns. — Stapelias. — Strange Shape of the Flower. — Its Smell. — Proof of the Sense of Smell in Flies. — Sedums. — Mesenibryanthemunis. — Ice Plants. — Crassulas. — Culture of Dwarf Succulent Plants. — Necessity of depriving them of Water during their Sleep. Gardening on the Etagere. IT IS but a few years since the fashion of i.ta- gtres has become general. People began by- covering them with all sorts of curiosities and specimens of natural historj^ — a custom which exists still. Then they fabricated out of wire, gilt, silvered or bronzed, charming little Itacfires in * Round-shaped cacti, which take their name from their resem- blance, in form and spines, to a curled-up hedgehog. — Mrs. Lou- "ion's Ladies' Companion to the Flower (Jarden. 32 THE PARLOR GARDENER. open work, which took up little room, coulcT be hung up any where, and hold a whole collection of little ornamental plants. This series of plants belongs, for the most part, to an order of vegetation having a very peculiar organization, and endowed with extraordinary vital energy. They are commonly called succu- lent plants, and are remarkable for the thickness of their fleshy and persistent leaves. Among a great many of these plants, the stalk and the leaves are one and the same organ : the leaves, when leaves exist, fulfil the functions of the stalk ; and reciprocally, Avhen the leaves are wanting, their vegetative duties are fulfilled by the stalk. Dwaxf Succulent Plants. You have no idea, my dear madam, how much skill and patience the horticulturists by profession have displayed in dwarfing these pretty plants ; some of which, when left to follow their own notions, in their native country, attain to colossal dimensions. n,,. h Fig. 2. — Etagere with dwarf succulent plants. 34 THE PAKLOR GARDENER. coal ; it -would make an enormous mass of it. Do you imagine that the tree could have drawn this mass of carbon from the soil Avhere it grew, •which does not contain a particle of carbon in its composition ? No, it drew this material from the atmosphere, by decomposing the air with its leaves. That is Avhat our pretty little dwarf suc- culent plants do ; and without this faculty, which they possess in a very high degree, they would not live. Cactus — Opuntias. Consider first those which belong to the numer- ous and strange family of the cactuses ; all of them natives of the warmest parts of America. See the ojjuntias, whose leaf-stems, or stem- leaves, whichever you please to call them, have the form of so many battledoors placed alongside of each other. These little plants represent to you in mhiiature those on which, in ]Mexico and in the Island of Madeira, lives the insect called cochineal, that furnishes to dyers and painters their finest red, under the name of carmine ; from which also, by the by, is made that rouge which occas-ionally serves in giving color to the com- THE PARLOR GARDE XER. 35 plexion of ladies towards Avhom mother Nature Avas stingy when she painted their cheeks. I do not mean, however, my dear young ladies, to in- timate that this was, by any means, the case with either of you. Melocacti and Echinocacti. To the same family belong also the melocacti and echinocacti. Their rounded forms composed of prominent ridges, their pretty crown of little satiny flowers, of a fine golden yellow, resem- ble those of no other family. In the mountains of the intojrior of Brazil, and in those of the centre of the Island of Jamaica, these same plants, — plants of the same species, — that you here see reduced to such exceedingly small pro- portions, grow upon the slopes of the most arid rocks, and become very large. Knowing this, you will understand that their bunches of thorns, inoffensive in the dwarfed plants because of their minute size, constitute defensive weapons Avhere- by they are preserved from the teeth of animals. Nevertheless, these arms prove useless to them against the wily attacks of the numerous herds 36 THE PARLOR GARDENER. of goats kept by the English colonists of Jamai- ca. The goats, animals essentially climbers by nature, climb up the most abrupt declivities of the rocks covered with melocacti and echinocacti. There, using their horns for the purpose, they root up these plants, and roll them down into the valley, where, as a preparation for eating them, they play with them as a child would play with a toy balloon, until, b}^ dint of rolling and tossing them about on the pebbles, the thorns have been all shaken out. Then the goats are able to feast upon them without damage to their mouths, just as though the thorns of the colossal cactuses were as little to be dreaded as are these dovvny representatives of those hard and tough spikes, produced by their sisters in miniature. Stapelias. There are other plants, of a different family, but the forms of which recall those of the cac- tuses : these are the stapelias. You Avill not fail to remark their strange flowers — thick, fleshy, violaceous, set Avith rough hairs, and having the form of a star. Do not approach too near this THE PARLOR GARDENER. 37 plant while it is in flower ; for its odor is not agreeable. This peculiarity, however, should not induce you to exclude it from your itagtre, where it will be very well placed, because of the singu- larity of its form. As to its smell, — which is not strong enough to incommode you, — I should not have mentioned it, but for the circumstance of its having caused this flower to be mistaken for a very diff"erent thing by the flies called flesh-flies ; which mistake has given rise to quite a curious observation in natural history. Have flies noses ? you will say, ladies. I must acknowledge that I do not know whether they have Sr have not noses ; although entomolo- gy, together with botany, are my favorite studies. This much, however, I do know — that they have the sense of smell. That this is certain you can ascertain for yourselves, by having a stapelia in bloom i;pon your ttagere. The flower of the sta- pelia smells like meat that has been kept too long; and flesh-flies, who lay their eggs on spoiled meat, are attracted to this flower by its smell. These eggs give birth to worms destined to become flies in their turn. If you shut flesh-flies up in a 38 THE PAULOR GARDENER. chamber where there is a stapelia flower, they Mill come and lay eggs on this flower, taking it for flesh — an error which they cannot be led into by the sense of sight, for the stapelia flower does not resemble in any respect a piece of meat. Consequently this mistake can only arise from their being deceived by the smell ; from which fact naturalists draw the conclusion, not that they have noses, but that they have the sense of smell. Sedums and Mesembryanthemums. There is another family of plants, no less vari- "bus, no less rich in pretty and copiously flowering species, than the cactus family itself. These are the sedums ; among which I have already made you acquainted with the pretty, yellow, star- flowered sedum, (stone-crop,) which blooms with- out earth and without water, suspended by a thread to the wall of a room. Another species, that of the mesembryanthe- mums, — with numerous flowers of all the shades of red, from the color of fire to the palest rose, — belongs also to the series of succulent plants. The prettiest vai'ieties have been rendered dwarf by I THE PARLOR GARDENER. 39 the horticulture of our day. If their name — a little long and a little learned — seems disagree- able to you to pronounce, call them plainly ice- jjlants. This is the common name of the variety that is the most extensively cultivated, and the leaves of which, Avith the stalk also, are powdered white, as if covered with frost. There are also the crassulas, with their leaves elegantly imbricated, and their little bunches of flowers of the deepest red. You will find some, also, of a pale rose-color. Both are as perfect in form, and as brilliant in color, as the same plants are in their natural dimensions, of half a yard or more in height. I pass over some of the best. But when you have made your choice among the prettiest dwarf varieties of cactuses — of the kinds of opuntia, melocactus, echinocactus, — and when you have added to these stapelias, sedums, ice-plants, and crassulas, confining yourself to the finest varieties, — you will have not only a sufficiency to decorate your itagh-e, even if it be a large one, but also enough to fill an elegant basket, which will pro- duce the best cfl'ect in the middle of your stand. 40 THE PARLOR GARDENER. And then, during more than half of the year, you "vvill constantly have some of your dwarf succu- lent plants covered with pretty flowers. Culture of the Dwarf Succulent Plants. It only remains to give you some hints about the way of managing them. For this purpose it is necessary to say a few words about their tem- perament. Cactuses, in their native country, bear excessive heat and dryness for six or seven months without interruption, followed by deluges of rain. The most violent storm -rains in our latitudes afford but a very faint idea of those tropical del- uges. During the dry season, the vegetative life of the cactuses is almost quite suspended. Their sleep is then much more profound than that of the plants with us which lose their leaves in winter. Now, from the knowledge of these facts, we per- ceive what sort of management is most suitable for them. All those which give no sign of active vegetation — on which neither young shoots nor flower buds make their appearance — ought to be watered only once a week. You may abstain altogether from watering them ; there will be THE PARLOR GARDENER. 41 neither more nor less budding for it when the proper time comes. Continue the same treatment if, at the return of warm weather, the cactuses show no signs of flowering : leave them dry a month or two ; they will not die for it — no dan- ger of this. When they begin spontaneously to vegetate, begin to water them with w^ater of the temperature of the room ; at first moderately, afterwards a little more freely, but never to ex- cess. The floods of rain that they got in their native country do not hurt them there, because the tropical climate renders evaporation rapid. It would not b3 the same in your house. The quan- tity should be, a tablespoonful of water for the pots of the size of a tumbler, and a teaspoonful for those the size of a wine-glass. Necessity of depriving them of "Water during their Sleep. That you may perfectly luiderstand the neces- sity of not watering your cactuses during the sleep of their vegetation, I will relate to you what happened to a botanist, Avho, being extremely fond of cactuses, had a very fine collection of 42 THE PARLOR GARDENER. them. A friend sent him a box of cactuses from the province of Minas Geraes, in Brazil, which he hastened to put in pots in his conservatory, and at the same time put by in a drawer a double set of specimens, which he proposed to make presents of. Forced to set out on a long journey, he for- got the cactuses in his drawer ; and on his re- tiu-n home, after an absence of several months, he found them there, faded, withered, in so deplor- able a state that he thought them lost. Never- theless, he planted them, and began to water them by degrees. All recovered and flowered abundantly; while those which had been planted, and taken care of ever since their arrival, only flowered in part ; many did not flower at all. His gardener had been afraid of letting them suffer from thirst, and had given them too much to drink. Keep in mind, then, ladies, that in order that yovir cactuses may bloom, it is necessary that the periodic sleep of their vegetation should be complete ; and that it cannot be so if they be watered at the wrong time. As to temperature, they are of a temperament that accommodates THE rARLOR, GARDENER. 43 itself very -well v/ith -what suits j-ourself. "When they bloom during the warm weather, put the ttagere before the open window some hours every day ; your cactuses will be the better for it ; their bloom will be more brilliant and of longer duration. The stapelias must be treated like the cactuses — no difference. The other succulent plants re- quire a little more water in winter ; their sleep being never so absolute as that of the cactuses and stapelias. Nevertheless, if you would have them to flower well when they wake, let them sleep. Do not water them during their sleep, except when they appear evidently to be suffering from thirst ; and then give them only just so much as is necessary to relieve their suffering. 44 THE PARLOR GARDENER. CHAPTER IV. THE FLOWER-STAXD GARDEN. Manner of keeping it. —Plants bought in Bloom. — Plants to culti- vate on the Flower-stand. — Its Dimensions.— Climbing Plants. — Passion-flower. — Mandevillea suaveolens. — Wood Pink. — Thunbergia alata. — Climbing Double Violet. — Manner of cul- tivating it. — Plants for the Middle Part of the Flower-stand. — Camellia. — Methods to prevent the Buds from falling. — Man- agement in cultivating. — Ericas or Cape Heaths. — Pimeleas. — Mignionette as a Tree. — Manner of forming it. — Its Duration. — Necessity of loving Flowers in order to take good Care of them. Manner of keepim? a Flower-stand furnished with Flowers. A FLOWER-STAND is a very pretty piece of furniture, which may be a little more simple or a little more ornamented, according to the de- gree of simplicity or elegance of the furniture around it, with which it should harmonize. It makes a necessary part of that furniture. There are two different ways of making use of it : these must be considered separately. If you merely wish !"./#■ , *^4^" 5 ^ THE PARLOR GARDENER. 45 flv>-«vers while you can get them from the garden- ers, agree with a gardener by profession, and he will keep your flower-stand furnished at all sea- sons with blooming plants. Your care will be confined to Avatering them and keeping them free from the dust. You will enjoy them ; but they will not be yovir work. Plants to cultivate on the Mower-stand. You will do better than that, if, having the leisure, you have the will also, to give assiduous attention yourself to the cultivation of the plants that are to adorn your flower-stand. I imagine this to be the case — that you are disposed to take a little of that trouble which is a pleasure, and to make of your flower-stand a real garden of your own. ^Ve will begin, if you please, in the month of November — at the time when the fall of the leaves brings back to the cities those who have passed the fine season in the country. Climbing Plants. Choose a flower- stand as large as the space 5'ou have to give it will allow ; keep it constantly 46 THE PARLOR GARDENER. with one side against the wall, so that you can put into it a trellis, shaped like a fan. The first thing now to be done is to cover this trellis with climbing plants ; they will not be the least inter- esting part of this miniature flower garden. Plant a passion-flower, as the principal ornament of this trellis ; let it be as wide and as high as it may, the passion-flower will soon cover the greater part of it. You mu^t add to this a somewhat rare plant, the Mandevillea suaveolois, and a very common plant, the wood pink. These three plants — the passion-flower, the Mandevillea, and the wood pink — bloom principally at the top ; and that the whole trellis may be ornamented equally with flowers, plant at each end a Thiin- bergia alata, and in the middle a double violet. The Thunbergia lays hold of any thing that is within its reach, without ever rising very high. It becomes covered with charming flowers, of a fine nankeen yellow, set off with a black spot in the middle. You find it, as well as the passion- flower and the Mandevillea, at all the green- houses. The price of these plants is never very high, and they accommodate themselves very well THE PARLOR GARDENER. 47 to the artificial climate of an iahabited room. Take good care not to buy them in bloom, even though you should be able to get them in full flower; take them at most in the bud; it will be much more agreeable to make them bloom yourself. Climbing Double Violet. Possibly you may never have seen a violet climbhig on a trellis. The culture of the double violet in this form is very common in Belgium and in all the north of France. It is not difficult. The double violet produces naturally, every year, a certain number of runners, like those by Avhich the strawberry is propagated. Attach to the trellis those runners which are so situated as to be able to take hold of it easily, and destroy all the others. The tufts in AA'hich each runner ter- minates will flower abundantly in this position. After they have bloomed, other runners will come out, which you must attacli to the trellis as you did the first ; so arranging them as that they shall not take possession of the space reserved for the other climbing plants. By this system, continued 48 THE PARLOR GARDENER. for some years, (time is necessary for every thing in horticulture,) the runners which have been raised and attached to the trellis will become nearly woody ; and every year, from the end of winter to the middle of spring, you will be able to gather from them a profusion of forced double violets, Avhose fragrance for you will far surpass that of the violets forced by the gardener, and which he makes you a present of for your money. Plants for the Middle Part of the Flower- stand. The middle part of the flower- stand is yet empty. To fill it Avell, place in the centre a fine camellia ; a Donkolerii ; or, if rose color be a favorite of yours, a marchioness of Exeter ; if you prefer white, an alba fiore jilena, a fimbriata, or an ochroleuca. There are at least five or six hun- dred kinds of camellias, with flowers very differ- ent from each other. !Make what choice you please ; only avoid taking for your flower-stand a plant that is inclined to grow too tall ; it wall injure the ornamental effect of the occupants of the trellis. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 49 Management of Camellias. When you buy your camellia it should be full of buds that have attained to about half their size. If there are too many buds, above all, if there are two or three in a bunch close together, you must not hesitate to sacrifice a portion of them. But, as the very short stem by which the flower bud of the camellia is attached to the branch, is pre- cisely the most delicate part of it, unless you observe great caution in detaching the superfluous ones, all will fall, one after the other, and you will not obtain a single flower. Happily, it is easy to avoid this annoying result. With a very sharp penknife, cut off", horizontally, the upper half of the buds which you do not wish to preserve, taking care to shake the plant as little as possible, and especially not to touch the bud stems. The remaining half of those buds will very soon fall of itself, without occasioning the fall of the entire buds. These will bloom perfectly a month or two later. Moreover, take care not to water your camellia with water that is too cold. This in- junction is so important, that I am not afraid of 4 50 THE PARLOR GARDENER. repeating it too often. Should its vegetation seem to you not vigorous enough, give to it, now and then, half a tumbler of the water that the dishes have been washed in. Frequently wash and wipe its leaves on both sides. Do all this, and it will bloom as beautifully in your flower-stand as if it had never quitted the greenhouse of the gardener who sold it to you. Mignionette as a Tree. Some pretty plants of Erica (cape heath) of the medium size varieties, and one or two pime- leas, — one with a white hanging flower, the other with a rose-colored, iipright one, — will complete the filling of the flower-stand. Do not fail to reserve, at each end, a little place for a plant of mignionette as a tree. You have probably never seen mignionette otherwise than in the ordinary form of an herbaceous plant ; and, as you do not live in the north of France, where these pretty shrubs are very much in fashion, it will be difli- cult for you to procure two tree mignionettes already formed. You must, therefore, form them for yourself. To do this, proceed as follows: THE PARLOR GARDENER. 51 Buy a pot of ordinary migiiionette. This pot ■will probably contain a tuft composed of many plants, produced from seeds. Pull up all but one ; and, as the mignionctte is one of the most rustic of plants, -which may be ti-eated without any delicacy, the single plant that is left in the middle of the pot may be rigorously trimmed, leaving only one shoot. This shoot you must attach to a slender stick of "white osier. The extremity of this shoot Avill put forth a bunch of flower buds, that must be cut off entirely, leaving not a single bud. The stalk, in conse- quence of this treatment, -will put out a multi- tude of young shoots, that must be allowed to develop freely until they are about three inches and a half long. Then select out of these, four, six, or eight, according to the strength of the plant, with equal spaces between them. Now, Avith a slender rod of white osier, or better, with a piece of whalebone, make a hoop, and attach your shoots to it, supported at the proper height. When they have grown two or three inches longer, and are going to bloom, support them by a second, hoop, like the first. Let them 52 THE PARLOR GARDENER. bloom ; but take off the seed pods before they have tune to form, or the plant may perish. It will not be long before neAV shoots Avill appear just below the places where the flowers were. From among these new shoots choose the one on each branch which is in the best situation to re- place what you have nipped off. Little by little, the principal stalk, and also the branches, will become woody, and your mignionette will no longer be an herbaceous plant, except at its upper extremities, which will bloom all the year with- out interruption. It will be truly a tree mign- ionette, living for an indefinite period; for, with proper treatment, a tree mignionette will live from twelve to fifteen years. I have seen them in Holland double this age. Resources that the Flower-stand offers. Ornamented and managed as I have directed, your flower-stand Avill be a continual source of agreeable recreation. There will always be Avork about your plants. The pleasure of providing for their wants will be as agreeable to you as that of seeins them flower, one after another. THE PAUL OR G A R D E X E Tl . 53 Their bloom will be the fruit of your own labor ; it will have been merited by the act of cultivating them. They will have for you a hundred times the value that the most beautiful plants would have which you bought, in bloom, from the gardener, and replaced by others without your having a hand in producing them. Moreover, young ladies, besides the plants with which I have just advised you to adorn your flower-stand, you have an immense lati- tude and many resources — unlimited, we may say — in the many varieties of the different spe- cies of other plants, equally worthy of your care. As we shall, in the course of this treatise, when engaged upon the subject of multiplying and cul- tivating plants, have occasion to make special mention of those just referred to, this need not be done here. I shall take care to make you acquainted with such as would figure to advan- tage in the flower- stand of your apartment ; which, if its situation be favorable enough, may form a companion to the garden on the mantel- piece, in addition to the garden on the 6tagtre. And pray observe, mothers, — to you do I now 54 THE PARLOR GARDENER. address myself, — that flowers are like children : in order to bring them up well, you must love them. If there be among you any who do not love flowers enough to bestow upon them the at- tentions that they require, neither the preceding counsels nor those of the following chapters will be intended for any such. THE PARLOR GARDENER. CHAPTER V. THE PORTABLE GREENHOUSE. Its Construction. — Plants that can be cultivated there. — Its Prin- cipal Utility. — Propagating Ornamental Plants. — Sowing.— Sowing of Azalea Seed. — Transplanting and Rearing the Young Plants. — The same as regards Rhododendron Seeds. — Sowing Orange Seeds. — Rearing the Plants. — Sowing the Seeds of Flemish Pinks. — Sowing of Ranunculus Seeds. — Separation of the Young Offsets. — Time of their First Flowering. milE VARIETY of plants that may be culti- -L vated ill an apartment is greatly increased, when, instead of ornamenting the stand of the parlor with a large basket filled with an assort- ment of dwarf succulent plants, the same spot is devoted to a portable greenhouse. Greenhouses of this kind may, as well as flower-stands, be ornamented externally in any manner conformable to the style of the rest of the furniture. This point depends entirely on the taste and fortune of those who propose to make use of them. 56 THE PARLOR GARDENER. The Cold Portable Greenhouse. The portable greenhouse may be cold ; that is. without any special means of warming it. It may also be tempered ; that is, furnished with an ap- paratus for producing artificial heat. Except for the size and the decoration, more or less elegant, it is nothing more than a great hand-glass,* of which the panes of glass, supported on a light iron frame, are arranged by means of slips of lead. Many of the upper panes should be made to open by sliding, as well to let air into the interior, as * Hand-Glasses — Portable frames or covers, formed of iron, zinc, or wood, and glazed. These glasses differ from bell-glasses in being longer and composed of numerous small pieces of glass, which are fastened together by narrow strips of lead. Hand-glasses are generally square; but they may be made of an octagon, or any other shape that may be found most convenient; and they are some- times made with a pane to open to admit air. or with the upper part to take off. Tliis is very convenient; for as hand-glasses are chiefly used for protecting half-hardy plants during winter, it is necessary to give them air every fine day, and it is very troublesome to be obliged to lift the hand-glass off the plant, and to lay it on one side, whenever this is done. Bell-glasses, on the contrary, being princi- pally for preventing the evaporation of moisture from the leaves of cuttings, do not require any opening, as the plants seldom want any air till they have rooted. — Mrs. Loudon's Ladies' Companion for the Flower Garden. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 57 that you may be able to tend and cultivate the plants within. A multitude of interesting experiments in hor- ticulture may be made, and charming results ob- tained, in the small space contained within a cold portable greenhouse. Its pots, none of them exceeding the medium size, may contain a com- plete assortment of the finest plants that are found in greenhouses, — not only in such as are not, but in such as are, -warmed by artificial means. If the portable greenhouse has not a special apparatus for warming it, it must be placed in a room where people habitually sit, of which it must necessarily take the temperature ; and this temperature is pretty nearly that of the artificially warmed greenhouse. Principal Utility of the Cold Portable Green- house. It is quite probable, ladies, that many of your familiar acquaintance are, like yourself, fond of parlor gardening. If you possess a cold portable greenhouse, you may, if you please, multiply indefinitely the choicest ornamental plants ; and, 58 THE PARLOR GARDENER. after having reserved for yourself the quantity necessary for keeping up your own stock, there will remain a large supply, which will afford you the means of contributing to the enjoyment of your friends by furnishing them with plants. We must first fill the pots with good sandy heath soil,* and then we can proceed with our work at our ease. Nothing is more agreeable, whether we keep the products or give them away, than to see them arrive at a presentable degree of development. For the purpose of propagation you have three methods at your option : by soicing, by slips, and by grafting. Neither of these is difficult in itself; attention and a great deal of patience are the only requisites to success in all three. Sowing. The list of ornamental plants which can be propagated in pots in the portable greenhouse is very long, even if we limit ourselves to gardening in the house alone. We will select from among those most worthy of attention ; and their propa- * Peat mixed with sand. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 59 gation by seeds will give a just idea of how you should proceed with any others that you may have a fancy for. Sowing of Azalea Seed. Let us begin with azaleas. Procure seeds of the most admired variety ; they will not always produce a shrub exactly like that from which the seeds were gathered. But so much the better. When your young plants bloom for the first time, you will be agreeably surprised to find remarkable novelties, either in the larger size of the corolla or in the brilliancy or delicacy of the colors. Those whose bloom does not seem to you satisfactory — and this will be the smaller number — can be made use of as stocks to receive the grafts of such varieties as you may prefer. Take care not to cover the azalea seed with more than the eighth of an inch of earth, which you must keep con- stantly damp, without excess of moisture, by water- ing often and giving very little water at a time. In your portable greenhouse the pots containing the azalea seeds come in contact only with air loaded with moisture, which being seldom changed, 60 THE PARLOR GARDENER. scarcely any evaporation takes place ; whilst, the temperature there being mild and very equable, the conditions are the best possible for obtaining a good germination of the seeds. Each pot having received but a small number of seeds, the young azaleas will sprout at their ease, without crowding one another. As soon as they have acquired con- sistence enough to bear transplanting, pull them up, one by one, and plant them singly in little pots, where they will continue to grow until they have become too large to remain in the portable green- house. Then take your share, and distribute the rest ; it is a sort of present that cannot fail to be acceptable. The seeds of rhododendrons are sowed exactly in the same manner as the seeds of azaleas, and with the same results. Sowing of Orange Seeds. Among the shrubs that are easily propagated by seeds in the portable greenhouse is the orange. Sow, for this purpose, seeds of very ripe oranges or lemons ; these last are most easily reared. Instead of pure heath soil, these seeds require a THE PARLOR GARDENER. 61 mixture of heath soil and good manure. By those "who carry on gardening as a trade, the pots in which orange and lemon seed are sown are buried in a hotbed, covered with a glazed frame ; but this is because they are in haste : for them, to gain time is to gain money. You, ladies, who are not under the empire of the same necessities, by sowing your seeds in February, a time of the year when there is fire in your apartment, will have the temperature of the interior of your portable greenhouse sufficiently high for them to come up in fifteen or twenty days. Your young trees will be much better off' under the shelter of your portable greenhovise than any where else ; air or light in excess would hurt them during the first period of their growth. You will have the pleas- ure of seeing them grow fast enough if you water them moderately. Towards the month of July they will already be strong ; the panes of the greenhouse ought frequently to be kept open, to habituate the young orange trees to contact with the air. Some of them can be grafted towards the first of November ; the others in the spring of the following year ; and when you see the first 62 THE paRlor gardener. floAvers open, this will give you more pleasure than all the orange flowers that could be brought to you. Sowings of Flemish Pink Seed. Side by side Avith your sowings of azaleas, rho- dodendrons, and orange, sow seeds of Flemish pinks, in the same mixture of heath soil and manure that I have directed as the most suitable for oranges and lemons. Transplanted when an inch or two high, the plants -will, the ensuing year, bear the choicest pinks, and these will be among the finest ornaments of your garden. Sowings of Kanunculus Seed. Sow also ranunculus seeds. This flower is a charming one — faultless in both form and color; nothing is wanting in it but perfume ; and for chamber gardening this is scarcely a defect. For the sowings of ranunculus seeds, procure a little cowdung, very dry and reduced to powder. After having slightly wet this maniuT, sow the seeds, with but a very shallow covering. They will come up in a few days. When you see the lit- THE PARLOR GARDENER. 63 tie leaves of the seedling wither and turn yellow, cease altogether to -water them. A few days afterwards, when the contents of the pots are perfectly dry, take the pots out of the cold por- table greenhouse ; crumble these contents care- fully, and pass them through a tin colander with very small holes. There will remain in the col- ander little plants of ranunculus, each one not more than an inch or two long. You are afraid, perhaps, ladies, that these so very delicate plants will make you wait a long time for their bloom. You are mistaken. When spring sets in, plant them in pots of the common size, in a mixture of good ordinary garden earth and manure ; they will all bloom before the end of the warm weather. You see how many things you can accomplish in horticulture, under the cold portable green- house, Avith nothing more than sowings. Slips offer you pleasures not less varied. Grafting, which your taper fingers, habituated to delicate work, can execute to such perfection, will add to your stock of enjoyments. You will after some time — not a long one — have around you 64 THE PARLOR GARDENER. a whole generation of ornamental plants, fnll of vitality, that your care will have brought into life, and j'our solicitude will have made to pros- per. It will end in your becoming attached to all these charming vegetable productions, as to so many friends of your own creation. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 65 CHAPTER VI. SLIPS IN THE PORTABLE GREENHOUSE — COLD OR HOT. Art of sticking Slips. — How the Slips talie Root. — Slips in the Cold Portable Greenhouse. — Slips of Dwarf Succulent Plants. — What is necessary to make them take Root. — Slips from I^eaves and Fragments of Leaves.— Slips of Begonias. — Slips of Dwarf Bengal Roses. — Of China Roses. — Of Pelargoniums. — Of In- dian Chrysanthemums. — Slips in the Hot Portable Greenhouse. — How this Greenhouse is constructed. — Slips of Camellias destined to be Grafted. Aj:t of Sticking Slips. THE prodigious multiplicity of resources con- trived by Nature for the propagation of plants is assuredly one of the most curious of all the facts revealed by the study of vegetable phys- iology. Life is disseminated with such profu- sion in all the parts of plants, that Avith many of them the least fragment placed in favorable circumstances becomes a complete plant. The art of rearing from slips rests upon the knowl- 5 66 THE PARLOR GARDE XER. edge of facts of this nature. If it has never hap- pened to you to stick any, or to see any stuck, I will inform you that a slip is a part of a plant detached from the mother plant and put in the earth, in the hope that it -svill be able to take root there. What is necessary to make a slip take root ? It is necessary for it to live long enough on its own vital energy for young roots to form, and to draw nourishment from the soil. When the tissue of the plant is soft, and contains a good deal of water, and when the branch that is de- tached to serve as a slip remains exposed to the air, the slip will not take root ; it dries too rap- idly ; the operation fails. On the contrary, roots always form when, by the exclusion of the ex- ternal air, evaporation is abated ; whilst, at the same time, the lower part of the slip is in a medium kept constantly moist, which solicits its taking root. Slips in the Cold Portable Greenhouse. Already, from what I have said, ladies, you have a glimpse of the utility that your cold I Fig. 4. — Cold Portable Greenhouse. THE PARLOR GARDENER 67 portable greenhouse will possess for propagating every kind of plant by slips. We may begin by your pretty dwarf succulent plants, detached fragments of which will, under the shelter which it affords, take root with marvellous docility. Take, for example, a charming opuntia, and sep- arate one of its little shoots, by cutting it at the base with a very sharp penknife. If you put this shoot in the earth as a slip at the moment that you cut it, the surface of the wound in contact with the earth will rot, and not a root will come forth. To be successful, you must lay the slip on one of the shelves of your itagh-e, and leave it for two or thi-ee days, that the wound may begin to scar over before it is planted ; when this takes place, plant it as if it had roots — and indeed it will not be long before it has them. To assure yourself of this, you need not pull it Mp, as children do, who, when they have put a bean in the earth, take it up once or twice a day to see if it is going to sprout — so that it never ^omes up. So soon as your slip has taken pos- session of the earth vvith its young roots, it will not fail to advise you of it by giving birth to 68 THE PARLOR GARDE XER. little shoots at the upper part. The growing of the upper part of any plant whatever, propagated by slips, is the most certain sign of the existence of young roots. All the dwarf succulent plants of the garden on the itaghre can, like the opun- tia, be propagated by slips, in the cold portable greenhouse ; only taking care that the part sep- arated as a slip be allowed to dry and begin to form a scab by contact with the air before planting it. Slips from Leaves. If you have renewed the contents of your flower- stand every season, you will have at the proper time achimenes in bloom. This pretty plant is easily cultivated ; and its numerous tubu- lated flowers, nearly the same in form with those of the paulownia, are in color of a beautiful light violet, or of a fiery red, regularly marked with yellow and purple within. Take off a leaf of achimenes and stick it by its stem ; it will take root, and this single leaf will in a short time be- come a perfect plant, similar to the one from which it was detached. But if the species that THE PARLOR GARDENER. 69 5'ou dosire to propagate by this means is rare, and you possess but one leaf, for which you are indebted to the kindness of an amateur, split this leaf down through the principal rib; split afterwards the two halves in four or five pieces, through the side ribs ; and these fragments, treated as slips, will not fail to take root. But, as this plant is of very loose tissue, and evap- oration might cause the slips to perish in a few days, even in your cold greenhouse, you will act prudently if, besides the shelter which it affords, you cover them separately, each with a small glass turned upside down. Slips of Begonia. Another genus of plants, not less agTeeable, the genus Begonia, is propagated by slips of leaves in a manner somewhat different. The stems of the leaves of begonias are of a cylindrical form ; those of the begonia manicata, or cuffed begonia, are ornamented with an elegant fringe for about one half of their length. If you stick one of these leaves in your portable greenhouse, do not be frightened, if, after the lapse of some days, the 70 THE PARLOR GARDENER. entire leaf fades and then draws up as if it had been shrivelled by a violent sun- stroke ; the vegetable life has withdrawn into the stem ; the operation has not been necessarily unsuccessful. "SVhen the leaf is dry, take the stem out of the earth ; it will not yet have roots, properly speak- ing, but all around its lower edge you will dis- tinguish little swellings composing a sort of roll, tolerably prominent : these are the rudiments of the roots ready to come out. This leaf-stem, althovigh hollow within, is thick and fleshy. Split it into five or six slips, down its length ; and each of these slips, provided it has at its base a portion of that little roll from which the roots are to come out, will become, in a short time, a fine plant of begonia manicata. Just as many pieces as you have been able to split that stem into, just so many thriving slips Avill you have ; all will take root. An indefinite variety of plants, as well those generally found only in warmed greenhouses as those which are seen in others, can be thus prop- agated. It will be for you an inexhaustible source of recreation, and at the same time a precious THE PARLOR GARDENER. 71 resource from which to renew the contents of the flower-stand and itagere, at all seasons. Bose Slips. To the above you can add a large collection of roses of diminutive size, selected from the series of Bengalese and Chinese roses ; the Lilli- putian Bengals, which are reared in a pot of the size of an egg-cup ; the Chinese dwarfs, of a bright red, which live very well in a tumbler of the ordinary size. The least fragment of a branch of one of these, stuck in the cold portable greenhouse, will take root and display its flowers the first year. Slips of Pelargoniums and Chrysanthemums. Do not forget to stick also a full supply of the prettiest species of fancy pelargoniums and chrysanthemums of India ; especially pompone * chrysanthemums, charming little plants, very pro- lific in flowers. They bloom all the winter, and present, we may say, with the exception of pure * From the word pompon, the worsted ornameut worn in soldiers' caps, in lieu of feathers. 72 THE PARLOR GARDENER. blue, all the shades of the rainbow, and, in addi- tion to these, the purest white, and a deep pur- ple, so deep as to be almost black. These chrysanthemums possess, as regards slips, a peculiar property, worthy of your attention ; they furnish slips at all the various stages of their vege- tation. Of such kinds as accord, in their natural dimensions, with the space that you have reserved for them, take, for sticking, young shoots between one and two inches in length. These slips will quickly take root, and in due time attain the nor- mal size of their species ; after which they will bloom. On the other hand, if you wish to stick some whose dimensions greatly exceed the space that can be disposed of in their favor, wait until the flower buds terminating the upper extremities of branches have attained about half of their size. Then detach such branches for slips, and plant them in pots, where they will very soon take root ; their buds will continue to develop, and you will obtain as fine a bloom as that which remains on the entire plant. These slips, however, will not grow ; they remain of the same size as when first planted. Fisr. 5. — Warm Portable Greenhouse. THE PARLOR GARDENER. ^6 Slips in the Warni Portable Greenhouse. Until now, ladies, I have spoken to you of such slips only as can be reared with success in the cold portable greenhouse. But you may rear a great many more, and these taken from the most interesting plants, if, for your cold greenhouse a warm one be substituted. To say nothing of form, which may vary ac- cording to taste, the essential difference between these two portable greenhouses consists in one of them being warmed at will ; to which pur- pose its shape and construction must, of course, be adapted. It must contain a lamp and a little reservoir for water ; this reservoir having an earthen-ware cover, upon which the pots wi^;h the slips are placed. This cover is pierced with a hole, into which a funnel may be placed, for the purpose of renewing the water as it evapo- rates ; and there must be lateral holes in the res- ervoir, for the steam to escape through. Under- neath this apparatus is the place for the lamp, — generally a spirit lamp, — which is lighted only when you wish to raise the temperature of the 74 THE PARLOR GARDENER. greenhouse. Although the heat produced by the flame of the lamp is not very great, it suffices to -warm the water in the reservoir, and the other contents of the greenhouse, to the degree requisite for maintaining its atmosphere at the proper tem- perature — say at from fifty-three to sixty-four degrees of the thermometer. Slips of Camellias. Provided with this addition to your resources, you may now add greatly to the variety of your floral decorations, and, whilst doing this, enjoy the pleasure of watching the growth of plants which refuse to take root in the cold greenhouse, but prove perfectly conformable to your wishes in this respect when provided with lodgings better suited to their tastes. Let us bogin by sticking slips of camellia there. This king of the shrubs of the cold greenhouse experiences great difficulty in making his start in life there. The labor of striking root proves gen- erally too great for his vital powers, unless aided by artificial heat. Thus aided, however, as they now are in your warm portable greenhouse, these THE PARLOR GARDENER. 75 slips will form their roots in the space of from fifteen to twenty days. You are already aware, ladies, that the most beautiful varieties of the camellia, although they can take root from the slips, produce, by this means of propagating them, only ill-shaped, puny plants, that are little disposed to flower well. Your slips should be taken only from single-flowered camellias ; or, if from the double-flowered, then the white or the pink only. From these you can obtain all the slips you need ; and these slips will become shrubs as vigorous as you can desire. By grafting on these shrubs, when a year or eighteen months old, you may multiply the choicest species and varieties ; their bloom will be all that you can wish. Grafting is another charming operation of hor- ticulture, which you could not easily realize in the cold portable conservatory. In the warm one, on the contrary, you may graft all sorts of orna- mental shrubs, and the success of your grafts is assured beforehand ; not one will fail. 76 THE PARLOR GARDENER, CHAPTER VII. GRAFTS IN THE PORTABLE GREENHOUSE. Of Grafting in general. — Resources that it offers for fixing the Fu- gitive Sub-varieties. — Extent to which Grafting is possible. — Tomatoes u|)on Potatoes. — Rice upon Phalaris. — Orange Graft. — Manner of Operating. — Wrappings of Woollen Yarn. — Appli- cations of the above Process. — Pontoise Graft. — Grafting the Camellia. — The Camellia in its Native Country. Of Grafts in general. BEFORE learning how to perform the different modes of grafting which belong to the domain of parlor horticulture, you may, perhaps, ladies, Avish to be informed what grafting itself is, con- sidered in a general point of view. Grafting, then, is, if I may be permitted to use the expres- sion, a forced marriage, often very badly as- sorted. Of this particular kind of forced mar- riage, the consequences cannot be happy, except when the two individuals, united without having been consulted, are very near relations ; that is to THE PARLOR GARDENER. 77 say, when they belong to species or varieties very proximate to each other. In the portable green- house, both cold and warm, we have just been practising, with complete success, the operation called slipping, in a variety of ways. Well, then, grafting is still another kind of slipping. Instead of putting the .slip in the earth, that it may there live by its OAvn roots, we join it on to another plant, where a piece has been cut away to make room for it. Then, instead of putting out roots of its own, that it may di'aw from the earth the sustenance which it requires, the graft incor- porates itself Avith the plant to which it has been attached, and feeds upon the stores provided by the latter for its own support. This it does without changing its own nature, or modifying in any way that of the other. You may have re- marked this in gardens. If a plum stock, upon which an apricot has been grafted, puts out young shoots below the graft, these are plum shoots. In like manner, a sweetbrier stock with a rose grafted on it, produces only branches of sweet- bi'ier, exactly such as they would have been had the plant never been grafted upon. On the other 78 THE PARLOK GARDENER. hand, the graft, and all produced by it, retains the nature of its parent plant as perfectly un- changed as if it had continued to form part of it. Owing to this law, results the most curious and precious are easily obtained in horticulture. Varieties, and fugitive sub- varieties, which it is impossible to reproduce by sowing, difficult even to preserve by slips, are fixed and propagated indefinitely. Survey of Grafts that are possible. That I may not have to repeat, I will remark now, ladies, that the domain of grafting, the extent to which successful grafting is possible, is very great ; so great that it has not yet been completely explored. You know, as every body does, that fruit trees and roses are grafted. I am gomg to have the pleasure of making you graft, in your portable greenhouse, oranges and camel- lias, wherewith to furnish your balcony garden when it shall come to be established. I am going also to make j'ou plant a simple and modest potato in a box, that you may have the pleasure of grafting on its stalks shoots of tomatoes. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 79 Yes, shoots that will bloom and produce their fruit, while the vegetation of the potato is run- ning its career and continuing to form its tiibers. On closing the account, you will gather potatoes enough for a dish, and tomatoes enough to make a sauce for the beef stew, to be served with the potatoes. I M'ill lay a wager, madam, that this tomato sauce will have a more exquisite flavor for your palate than any your cook ever pre- pared before, let her be the very best of all possi- ble cooks. When you procure an aquarium, you may cul- tivate rice in it, which will come to perfect ma- turity. You must graft shoots of this rice upon seeds of the species phalaris ; and you will see that they will not grow the less healthily, nor form their ears the less perfectly for being grafts. I tell you all this beforehand, in order that you may at once form an idea of what it may be pos- sible to accomplish by grafting, even when re- stricted to the narrow limits of horticulture in the parlor. 80 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Orange Grafts. Here are the young stocks, the product of the orange and lemon seeds sown by yovi a year ago. They are the size of a quill ; their wood has consistence, their vegetation is vigorous ; it is time to graft on them. Let us take for grafts young shoots of a myrtle-leaved China orange — one of the prettiest varieties to cultivate in an apartment, whether on account of its numerous flowers, which are fragrant, but not too strongly so, or on account of the fruits that succeed these flowers, and which, preserved in sugar or in brandy, are a favorite treat for a numerous class of consumers. About half way up the stock, you make choice of a leaf very green and well formed ; at the fork of this leaf — that is to say, at the point where it connects with the stalk — there is an eye, which eye, if left there, would produce a side branch. With a newly- sharpened penknife, cut a little way into the wood, above and beloAv the eye, making these cuts slanting, so that a small portion of the stalk, containing that eye, shall be sep- THE PAULO R GARDENER. »1 arated and fall, -without the leaf being detached. Now you have a cutting, the size and form of which you must examine with care. This being done, you mvist then, for the graft that is to oc- cupy the vacancy just made by you, select a little branch of myrtle-leaved orange, and the lower end of this must be cut into such shape as to tit very exactly into the place cut in the stock. As the graft, if left there after being fitted, would fall apart at the least shake, it requires to be fastened in its place, until it shall have taken firm hold and incorporated itself with the stock. This is eff'ected by putting a bandage on. But here a difficulty presents itself, which has caused many a failure, but ma}-, however, easily be surmounted by a little attention. If you do not draw the bandage tight enough, it will not hold the two surfaces in contact, and this would prevent the success of the operation. If, on the other hand, you draw it too tight, this will interfere with the circulation of the snp ; your graft will be strangled, as the gardeners say. Take care, then, to adjust your bandage perfectly — avoiding both extremes ; tight enough, but only just tight 6 82 THE PARLOR GARDENER. enough, to keep the graft firmly in its place. Em- ploy for this purpose untwisted woollen thread, which, in case you have drawn it somewhat too tight, will, from its elasticity, accommodate itself to Avhat the sap requires, and prevent strangling. Applications of the above Method of Grafting. All graftings of this sort that can be made on other shrubs with persistent leaves, besides orange trees, and especially upon daphnes and myrtles, will prove completely successful, pro- vided that at the time you graft them these shrubs are in full sap — that is, that their vegetation is in full activity. Strictly speaking, in ornamental shrubs with persistent leaves, the sap is never completely stationary, as it is in winter with those that lose their leaves. They have, how- ever, a half repose in winter ; after which their sap begins to flow again with renewed energy. This is the most favorable time for grafting them. Grafting a la Pontoise. As to the orange, its vital principle is so very active that you can, without fear, trust a graft Fig 6. — Graft k la Pontoise. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 83 quite full of flower buds ready to bloom, to a seedling stock a year or eighteen months old. The graft should be of a diameter nearly equal to that of the stock ; it -will take directly. The course of the sap is not sensibly interrupted, and the buds will open as if they had remained upon the shrub from which they were detached. In all cases, the entire stock above the graft should be removed, so that the portion of the stock be- low the graft shall form merely the lower part of the trunk of the tree, whilst all above shall be formed from the graft exclusively. If this sort of grafting, named by the French gardeners graft- ing a la pontolse, were conducted in the open air, the evaporation from the leaves would kill the graft before it took. It can succeed only when excluded from contact with the air. Your orange trees grafted in this manner will be perfectly sheltered under the glass of your portable gi-een- house ; which you must take care to keep close shut, until your grafts, by continuing to grow, give you assurance that they have taken. 84 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Grafting Camellias. Now, ladies, that you know how to graft orange trees, you can, without further teaching, graft the single camellias that you have multi- plied by slips ; the proceeding is exactly the same. You must not, however, take for grafts — as you did for the orange — branches bearing flower buds ; the flower buds would not bloom, and the flower-bearing branches would with dif- ficulty be made to grow to the stock. You also already know that the bud of the camellia only takes with certainty in the warm greenhouse ; unaided by artificial heat, the sap of the camellia, much less active than that of the orange, would not suffice to assure the success of the grafting. Moreover, I would have you remark, ladies, that grafting off'ers you infinite resources for re- juvenating old camellias that have gone out of fashion. Graft upon their boughs, whatever their age may be, young shoots of camellia, of the kind that may be most in fashion at the time. Camel- lias, like yourselves, are subject to the caprices of fashion. These grafts will always take ; the THE PARLOR GARDENER. 85 camellia in its native country being a sturdy tree, of a very robust temperament, which it partly preserves in the conservatories of Europe and America. If it should ever happen to you to make a pleasure trip to Japan, — it might so hap- pen to any body, — you would see that, although the camellia is a sacred tree, which they plant round the temples, while its flowers are used in making garlands for religious festivals, they treat it in other respects with but little ceremony. You would see entire woods of them, of great extent, where every camellia is trimmed up to a single stem, as straight as a hop-pole. Do you know what they do when these camellias are of an age to be cut doAvn ? They make of them, ladies, simply handles for brooms, or spades, or other utensils ; they are intended for nothing else. Do not expect, in going to Japan, the country of the camellia, to see this charming shrub such as you see it here. The Japanese gardeners do not trouble themselves much in bringing it to perfection. Your camellias, that you have reared from slips and grafted with your own hands, might serve as models to those that figure in the gardens of the Emperor of Japan. THE PARLOR GARDENER. CHAPTER VIII. THE HOUSE AQUARIUM. Aquariums. — Travelling Botanists. — The Victoria Regia. — The House Aquarium. — Its Construction. — What causes the Cor- ruption of Stagnant Water. — Means of avoiding it in the House Aquarium. — The Cobbler. — Interesting Habits of this Fish. — Aquatic Plants for the Aquarium. — Hydrocharis. — Pontede- ria. — Mimosa Pudica, or Aquatic Sensitive Plant. — Rice grafted upon Phalaris. — Manner of grafting it. — Aquatic Ranunculus. — Its Manner of Vegetation. The Aquarium. ALL OF you, ladies, are acquainted with aqua- riums ; most of you have little ones of your uwn, got up without expense, and I do not pro- pose to you to attempt having them on the grand scale that ^Ir. Ysabeau describes. His description, however, is so interesting, that I will not omit it. He says, — speaking of large gardens, — that an aquarium is a conservatory, of a square or oval form, with a ridged roof, the interior of which encloses a basin in which ornamental aquatic THE PARLOR GARDENER. 87 plants are cultivated. You exclaim at this word, and stop me short by observing that the culture of aquatic plants is beyond the powers of the par- lor gardener. If this be your opinion, ladies, permit me to say, that you are under a great mistake, and I shall endeavor to convince you of it. But let me first inform you, a little more in detail, what an aquarium is. There exists among the learned men a class, essentially adventurous, who have a horror of the fireside, security, and repose. These are the trav- elling botanists ; men who are always on the road, (when they happen to be in a country where there are roads,) to discover vegetable rarities and novelties. I have had occasion to call your attention to them in speaking of dwarf succulent plants of the cactus family. Among the novelties with which these indefatigable seekers have been enriching our collections for some years past, are found quite a large number of aquatic plants from the tropical regions. Among these is the great nenuphar of the River of the Amazons, the Vic- toria regia — true queen of the tropical waters. So long as the number of hothouse aquatic 88 THE PARLOR GARDENER. plants -was not too great, people contented them- selves with lodging them in the reservoir where the Avater destined for watering was kept. But when the Victoria regia arrived in Ein-ope, the leaves of which, unfolded upon the tranquil waters, measured more than a yard in diameter, the bota- nists perceived the propriety of lodging it and other beautiful tropical aquatic plants of largely dimensions, conformably to their rank, in basins of tepid water, within hothouses, which are, at present, very numerous in Europe, and are desig- nated under the name of aquarbuns. You understand, ladies, that this preamble is not at all designed to pave the way to counselling you to convert your parlor into a basin ; Avhich, by the help of a thermo-siphon, being kept at the temperature of the waters of the River of the Ama- zons, you might have the satisfaction of seeing grow and bloom there the Victoria regia. I am going to propose something less impracticable. House Aquarium. The house which you occupy is one into which water is brought. You have a parlor on the I THE PARLOR GARDENER. 89 ground floor, and a vaulted cellar under this par- lor. These circumstances permit you to have a house aquarium, of which it is now my business to. show you the advantages in regard to parlor horticulture. In the middle of your parlor you must place a table, with four legs, in the form of columns, two of which legs must be hollow, and have pipes within them ; one to receive the water when it comes, and the other to conduct it off. In the middle of this table, an elegant glass basin, thick enough to be strong, must be supported by four hollow columns of polished brass, similar to those which sustain the beam of a pair of scales. The pipe enclosed in one of the legs of the table must be prolonged through one of these columns, and a swan's beak at the top of the column will pour a continued stream of water into the basin, Avhich water will escape by an opening of a suitable diameter, contrived for the purpose, in one of the columns at the opposite side of the basin. 90 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Fish that ought to be put in it. Before speaking to you of the plants that the water of youx- aquarium can nourish, and of the culture of these plants, I will answer an objection which naturally presents itself here : the water of your basin, you will say, although renewed by a continued stream, cannot fail to be corrupted, and to fill your house with a marshy smell, which will be as disagreeable as unhealthy. Here is another mistake ; and so you will ac- knowledge, if you permit me to give you some words of explanation on the subject of stagnant water. When water exhales an odor of putrid- ity, it is not the water itself that is corrupted ; it is the animal matter which it holds in suspension ; it is, above all, the thousands of animalcula which are born, live, multiply, and die there with a prodigious rapidity, and of which water, to all appearance most pure, contains hordes without nvunber. But, if you place in the aqua- rium living fish, they will nourish themselves with these animalcula as well as with the animal and vegetable matter held in suspension in the THE PARLOR GARDENER. 91 water ; and that of the aquarium will never ex- hale the odor of stagnant water. If you do not like one fish better than another, and have no preference for the gold fish of China, who are in possession of the privilege of con- stantly peopling the basins, I would advise you, ladies, to adopt the pretty little fish named by the naturalists epinocJie, and well known under its vulgar name of cobbler, because of the point, in the shape of an awl, M'ith which its back is armed. The manners of this fish, that you can study at leisure through the transparent walls of your aquarium, are ver)'' interesting. It alone, among all the known fish, makes a nest, which it does out of the refuse parts of the aquatic plants, and in this nest the female deposits her eggs. Both male and female, after the eggs are hatched, take assiduous care of the young family. Plants to put in the Aquarium. Pardon an old professor of natural history, ladies, for this short excursion into the domains of iclithyolog5\ I have wandered from parlor gardening ; I hasten back as quickly as I can. 92 THE PARLOR GARDENER. There is a crowd of charming plants among which you may choose to fill the water of your aquarium, such as the hydrocharis, pontederia,* and many others. One word only upon those most worthy of attention. You are, doubtless, acquainted with the sensitive plant, or mimosa pudica, the leaflets of which withdraw and con- tract when they are touched. There exists an aquatic species of this, which you can have float- ing upon the parlor aquarium, for it is very small. Its leaflets are exactly similar to those of the terrestrial sensitive, and possess the same retractile properties. Manner of grafting Rice. If you put at the bottom of your aquarium a pot filled with good earth, where you have sowed some grains of rice which have not had the husk taken off, they will come up ; and you can have the pleasure of grafting the plants from these seeds upon reeds. For this purpose you must cut, by a slanting cut at one of its joints, a rice * Frog-bit — a prettj' little British water-plant with white flow- ers. — Mrs. Loudon's Ladies'' Companion fur the Flower Garden, THE PARLOR GARDENER. 93 straw having its ear half developed ; then, in a contrary slant, cut a joint of the phalaris reed, Avhich is to be the stock of your graft, and fit one to the other, wrapping them with a thread of very fine woollen yarn. The whole, for greater security, must be attached to a rod for a support. You will thus see the rice stalk, nourished by the phalaris, ripen its grain as well as that which is not grafted. There is a little plant, the aquatic ranunculus, common in all our streams, which, if you follow my advice, you will admit into the society of the rarest plants. "What recommends it is its pecu- liar mode of vegetation. After springing from the seed at the bottom of the basin, the stalk, as it progresses in its growth, puts forth, in place of leaves, elegant filaments of a fine, pale green ; and this continues to be the case until it has be- come long enough to reach the surface of the water, and come in contact with the air. Then, as if transformed suddenly into a different plant, its Avhole appearance changes ; no more filaments to be seen ; they have become metamorphosed into leaves cut in segments, which lie floating upon 94 THE PARLOR GARDENER. the tranquil Avater, and amidst which rise the floral stalks, bearing little bingle flowers — white, with a yellow mark at the base of each petal. Common as it is, the aquatic ranunculus maj--, with its European physiognomy, hold its place very well in the midst of the most beautiful aquatic plants of foreign origin.* Take notice, I beg you, ladies, that I do not in ♦ Description of tlie water ranunculus in America by Dr. Dar- lington, of West Chester, Pa., in his Flora Cestiica : — " Rnmmndus, Linn., (Latin rana, a frog, the plant often growing where frogs abound.) " Rammciihis aqnataiK, Linn., wat'er ranunculus; Vulgo, river crowfoot. '• Root perennial. Stems numerous from the root, proeumbently floating, nine to eighteen inches long, very slender, smooth, jointed, branching, and usually throwing out a couple of filiform roots at the joints. Leaves alternate, one at each joint, . . . segments half an inch to an inch long. . . . Petals white or ochroleucous, yellow at base. . . . • Habitat, flowing waters: Brandy wine, frequent. Flowers June to August. '' Obsprrntion. — I have often found this plant entirely submersed (and usually in swift-running water) so deep that the flowers cer- tainly never reached the surface. Professor De Ca.idolle enumer- ates five varieties of this species, four of which Professor Hooker gives as natives of British America; but I have only met with the present one in this county, (Chester County, Pa.) " THE PARLOR GARDENER. 95 any way pretend that there is no objection to a house aquarium ; it costs a good deal, and causes derangements — particularly for its first establish- ment — which would prevent its being admitted every where ; but it incontestably forms a part of parlor gardening for all such as can afford the expense, and are willing to submit to the incon- veniences occasioned by it for the sake of the pleasures that it will yield in return. PART II. THE GARDEN AT THE WINDOW. CHAPTER IX. THE GAKDEX UPON THE BALCOXY. Exposure of the Balconies. — The Balcony to the North. — Irish Ivy, Hepaticas, Digitalis (Foxglove), Mimulus (Monkey Flower), II\pericuni (St. John's-wort), Nemophila, Violets, Periwinkles. — The Balcony to the East. — Cobaa, Spanish Beans, Volubilis. — Suspended Flower Vases. — Disposition of the Flowers upon the Balcony to the East. —Lilacs, Gillyflowers, Pinks, Pansies, Mignionette. — The Balcony to the West. — Sticking Slips of Pelargoniums and Chrysanthemums. — Management of the Growth of the Slips of Pelargonium. — Of the Slips of Chrysan- themums. — Chinese Method. — European Method. — The BaU cony to the South. — Sowing Seeds. — Precautions against the Sun. Exposure of the Balconies. fT^IIE TITLE of this Avork imposes on me the _L obligation of first saying something to you of (96) THE PARLOR GARDENER. 97 all that it is possible to do in horticulture without leaving your house. I hope I have showed you, ladies, that to satisfy your enlightened taste for beautiful, ornamental plants, and to occupy a part of your leisure time very agreeably, nothing more is necessary than gardening in a parlor. But this in no way prevents your giving also some of your attention to the only out-door garden which is pos- sible to the greater portion of the inhabitants of large populous cities — the garden at the window. Before any thing else, you must consider the exposure of your windows ; for the question is no longer how to cultivate living plants in the arti- ficial atmosphere of an inhabited chamber, or a portable greenhouse. The garden plants at the window are destined to live in the open air, if, indeed, the gaseous fluid of cities, which is alone at their disposal, merits the name of air. The greater part of the time, however, they do not live there : reared in real gardens by real gardeners, bought in full flower to shine for some da^^s only, they make haste to die in a medium that is not really air, and where, consequently, one cannot exact of them to live. Your windows are either 7 98 THE PARLOR GARDENER. exposed to the north, to the east, the west, or the south ; or their exposure is intermediary between these four points. The Balcony to the North. A balcony with a full northern exposure, par- ticularly if it looks out on a street of only moder- ate width, and is situated too low down to escape from the emanations below, is in a position pre- senting the worst conditions as regards horti- culture. Does this mean that we need not attempt gardening there ? Far from it. It means only that the choice of plants with which it is possible to adorn our garden is very limited ; for all have need, more or less, of contact with the rays of the Sim. First, you must surround the balustrade and the framework of the window with a decoration of ivy, which will give 3'ou a perpetual verdure. There are several varieties, the best of which is the Irish ivy ; its growth more rapid, and its green less sombre, than the common sort. If you take care to curtail such shoots as grow too long, and to pull off such leaves as turn from green to THE PARLOR GARDENER. 99 yellow, the Irish ivy -will surround your window to the north with a drapery of ever- verdant vegeta- tion, which will serve to bring out advantageously the few flowers that it is possible to cultivate in this exposure. The hepaticas, blue and rose-rcol- ored — the lily of the valley — the digitalis, (fox- glove,) violet and white — the mimulus, (monkey flower,) — the large flowered hypetdcum, (St. John's- wort,) — and the charming ne/HO/;7ii7a, — are all plants which, as they grow naturally by the side of great forests, may consequently do without the sun. These, with the violet and the periwinkle for their modest companions, will be the principal elements of decoration for your garden at the window with a northern exposure. If, regardless of expense, you be fully deter- mined to have on this balcony all the plants of the season, then procure and place them there, despite of the short duration of flowers in this exposure. You will do this knowing beforehand that the plants Avill die some time after flowering — an an- noying result, which, however, cannot be avoided ; it forms part of the cost which must be paid for the pleasure of having them there. J.OO THE PARLOR GARDENER. The Balcony to the East. On a balcony to the east — if the street be a tolerably wide one, and the balcony belong to a story high enough to receive a ration of air, if not very pure, at least supportable — gardening can be praclised on a grand scale. The windoAV may be surrounded -svith climbing coboea, instead of ivy. This is a plant of very elegant foliage, although its flowers have but lit- tle brilliancy. You can give to it for companions Spanish beans and volubilis. These tAvo Avould not have flowered at all to the north ; nor will they flower to the east either, as they Avould do to the west or the south. Their flowers, never- theless, will, by their lively tints, make an agree- able variety of colors in the decoration of your window with the eastern exposure. Suspended Flower Vases. Giving to this decoration the graceful form of an arch, by means of a simple hoop nailed to the two frames of the window, you must join with it the accessory ornament of an earthen- ware vase Fig. 8 — Hanging Flower-rase. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 101 of elegant form, in which to place a common flower pot containing ornamental plants ; some with straight stalks — such as petunias or red- flowered geraniums; others with hanging stems — such as Chinese saxifrage, the runners of which, like those of tlie strawberry, bloom at each joint while floating freely in the air. Similar vases are appropriate ornaments for the wmdows of all other exposures except the northern. During the cold, season they can be taken in, and hung to the ceiling like chandeliers ; and it is easy to procure such as will perform the office of veri- table chandeliers, being set round with sockets for holding candles, choice plants — agaves, for instance — occupying the centre, whilst hanging plants, pouring over, as it were, through the spaces between the candles, depend from the rim of the vase. Disposition of the Flowers on the Balcony to the East. On the eastern balcony, besides the plants be- fore pointed out for the northern exposure, a great variety of common plants — which are not 102 THE PARLOR GARDENER. the less agi-eeable for being common — may suc- ceed each other all the year round. That you may not deprive yourself of the use of the bal- cony, in case of your liking occasionally to stand there, you must take care to place such shrubs as roses and Persian lilacs at the two ends ; next to them, such herbaceous plants as are somewhat tall — gillyflowers or pinks, for instance ; then the rest in the middle. The very low ones — pansies, auriculas, or mignionette — should be in a shal- low zinc vessel, such as is used for flower- stands. Thus, when at your window, you feel as if sur- rounded by all the perfumery of your toilet ; and you will not be deprived of the use of your bal- cony, when it pleases you to go out upon it to breathe there the best air that the city aff'ords at this season — that is, a compound consisting of a little air and a great deal of dust. As you would not wish to quarrel with your neighbors, nor your landlord, nor the police, you must take care to keep under the pots and boxes ornamenting your balconies vessels of varnished earthen ware, sufficiently deep to hold the overflowings of the waterings ; you will thereby avoid staining the THE PARLOR GARDENER. 103 front of the house, and givmg to passers-by a sort of shower bath which may not be to their taste. During prolonged droughts the foliage of the plants of your garden at the window may probably change from green to gray — thanks to a thick coat of dust ; in which case, you must, at least once a week, have these plants taken, one by one, to the sink in your kitchen, and there, by means of a watering-pot with a rose pierced with very small holes, give them, one after the other, a good washing, such as they receive from a pretty long shower of rain. All the flowers of the season — from the violet of March to the chrysanthemum of December — may succeed one another on the balcony exposed to the east. Perhaps the heliotrope (which re- quires a great deal of sun) and the lantanas, and some others, may be exceptions ; these will, at any rate, do better to the west and south. The Balcony to the West. On the Mestern exposure you have carte blanche ; every ornamental plant may pass the warm season there. You can place there, for the 104 THE PARLOR GARDENER. whole summer, myrtles, oranges, rose laurels, pomegranates, camellias, kalmias, and azaleas, ^vhich belong in winter to the garden in the house. Two sorts of plants, alike agreeable, — • the pelargoniums and the Indian chrysanthemums, — can be easily propagated there, by slips stuck in the way I have already shown you. Nor is there any need of a portable greenhouse this time : you may stick them simply in pots filled with good earth, taking care to place over your slips, for the first eight or ten days, a tumbler turned upside down, pressing down the edge slightly into the earth. After the slips have taken, remove the tumblers, and water the young plants once or twice a Aveek with a good glass of dish-water that you have had put aside for this purpose by the cook ; you will see with what vigor they put out. I shall take this occasion to give you some advice that Mill be useful to you, on the manner of training the pelargoniums and chrysanthemums that you have propagated by slips. Figj. 9. — Chandelier Flower-vase. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 105 Method of training the Pelargonium Slips. A slip of pelargonium, left to itself, shoots at hazard right and left, puts forth a quantity of foliage and flowers badly : this is what the French gardeners, adopting a term applied generally to colts, call badly broken. When you see it well rooted, and beginning to shoot vigorously, pinch off the top. The two or three shoots next below this will develop in side branches of nearly equal strength ; destroy all that put out below these, retaining them alone to form a regular head. If one of these branches runs up, and is impatient to pass the others, do not hesitate to pinch it off. Below this point two shoots must be left at first — one of them to be taken off at the end of eight or ten days. Thus will equality in the vegetation of the pelargonium be main- tained. These attentions will be a true pleasure to you ; you will witness their effect immediately ; and the flowering of your pelargoniums thus man- aged will be as equal and as perfect as is natural to the different species of this beautiful genus. 106 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Training Chrysanthemum Slips. Chrysanthemums propagated by slips should be treated in the same manner, according to the same principles. If you belonged, ladies, to the good society of Pekin, instead of to that of our Coven- try, the following is the way you would treat your chrysanthemums : After having planted each one of your slips in a deep and slender vase, you would direct your care to the development of the terminal shoots ; as shoots made their appearance, they would be pitilessly destroyed. The chrysan- themum thus treated will gain a great deal in height, and will end by forming at its summit a single tuft of flowers, of which flowers one only must be allowed to remain : this one will arrive at a most extraordinary degree of development. It is thus that the wives of the mandarins culti- vate the chrysanthemum — the flower of their special predilection. Every j-^ear, in the great cities of the Celestial Empire, there are exhibitions specially for chrysanthemums, where every body sends their flowers, and where prizes are decreed for the tallest plants ; not as to the most beauti- THE PARLOR GARDENER. 107 ful flowers, but to the most beautiful flower, each plant having but one. To every country its custom, the proverb says. To ourselves, " outside barbarians " as we are, the chrysanthemum, cultivated in the Chinese fashion, appears, and with reason, completely de- void of grace. You will take care, then, by means of the same pinching process practised upon the pelargoniums, to compel your chrysan- themums to form a head consisting of three or four branches of equal strength, well furnished with flowers, making the plant of such a height from the ground as may be suited to the disposa- ble place on your balcony, and leaving to each branch the number of flowers which it sees fit to have. The Balcony to the South. It is upon the balcony exposed to the south, ladies, that you can practise the most varied hor- ticulture — a balcony to the south being the bor- der of a parterre on a reduced scale. There, in pots filled with an equal mixture of earth and manure, you may produce, by sowing, all the annual ornamental plants — pansies, Queen Mar- 108 THE PARLOR GARDENER. garets (China-asters), balsams, tagetis (French and African marigolds), petunias, and coreopsis; and to these sowings you will be indebted for this part of the decoration of all your balconies and of your flower- stand. For, upon a balcony with a southern exposure, may be made to grow, from the seed, plants, not only for yourself, but for all your friends and acquaintances besides. Precautions against the Sun. But the success of this part of your gardening depends on one precaution, for the want of which all would fail. The ardent sun of the summer must never strike directly on the outside of your pots. In their natural situation, the roots of plants, plunged into the soil, receive only a heat tem- pered by the coolness imparted to them by the soil beneath. In pots, on the contrary, the ex- tremities of these roots, which line the inside of the pot, and which are the most tender part of them, are literally burnt when the sun shines on its external surface. You must not think that repeated waterings will remedy this : if you water THE PARLOR GARDENER. 109 the plants often, the roots in pots exposed to the sun, being then in contact with hot water, will be boiled instead of being roasted, which will come exactly to the same thing, so far as their life is concerned. It is then indispensable to have a plank, inside of the balustrade of your balcony facing the south, which plank, its edge touching the floor, must reach as high as the top of the largest pots. The outside of the pots being shaded by this plank, the roots of the plants will experience only a moderate degree of heat ; for any excess of this may then be prevented by fre- quent waterings. So says our author with reference to the climate of Europe. In ours, however, plants in pots require an additional protection from the sun — the shade of a tree, or an awning, or something of the sort. 110 THE PARLOR GARDENER. CHAPTER X. THE GARDEN UPON THE LARGE BALCONY. The Terrace Balcony. — Boxes to furnish it. — Running Shrubs; Glycine (Wisteria), Virginia Creeper, Buddleya, Clianthus (Crimson-glory Pea). — Assorted Plants. — Seedling Ranunculus. — Manner of assorting the Shades. — Use made of the Plants propagated in the Portable Greenhouse: Pinks, Hyacinths, Tulips, Crocuses, Pelargoniums, Chrysanthemums, Fuchsias, Lantanas, Heliotropes, Mignionette. — Utility of this last. — Win- ter Dress of the Terrace Balcony.— Galanthus (Snowdrop). — Japan Quince. — Hellebore. — Christmas Rose. — Variegated Holly. HAPPY the person, who, in the interior of any large city, possesses a large balcony, with an exposure ever so little to the south. It is almost equal to the possession of a garden. The Terrace Balcony. We may consider as garden terraces those long and wide balconies, extending, if not all along the front of the house, at least for a sufficient dis- tance to admit of our gardening there in a far less Fig. 10. — The Balcony Garden. THE PARLOR GARDENER. Ill confined space than in the mere veranda of a window. Access to such balconies being had through windows reaching down to the floor, be- fore each window an interval should be reserved, to allow you to approach the balustrade and lean on your elbows whilst looking out. Should it be your good fortune to occupy a lodging ren- dered at once healthy and agreeable by such an appendage as a spacious balcony with a good exposure, the side spaces, intermediate to those kept open in front of the windows, may be sup- plied with wooden boxes, longer than they are wide, painted green, and filled with good garden earth, mixed with manure. You have but to consider these boxes as the borders of a parterre, and proceed to garden there accordingly, as you would on the ground. Plants for the Balcony Garden. — Wiste- ria and Virginia Creeper. At each end of the balcony a box, — its length equal to the width of the balcony, — which two boxes have a special destination : it is there that you must plant a glycine of China — (Wisteria), 112 THE PARLOR GARDENER. and a bignonia, or Virginia creeper (trumpet flower), — the running stems of which are to be trained parallel to each other along the balustrade. Thus, without encumbering the balcony, you will have, in the spring, the beautiful bunches of amethyst flowers of the Wisteria, hanging grace- fully outside, and shedding an odor the most delicately sweet of almost any of the whole vege- table kingdom ; and in autumn the flowers of the Virginia creeper, in bunches of a rich red, will renew the decoration. During the inter- mediate heats, the abundant foliage of these two plants will very advantageously protect the boxes of ornamental plants from the burning contact of the solar rays. You need not contrive any other shelter for them. Buddleya and Cliantlius. To procure still more shade, add to the above a robust plant of buddleya on one side, and a red flowered clianthus on the other. The buddleya, attached to a solid stick, upAvards of a yard and a half high, and left to itself from this height, will fall in all directions, with as much THE PARLOR GARDENER. 113 grace as do the flexible branches of the weeping willow. At each extremity of slender and supple branches will open a long bunch of flowers, of a fine violet color. Should it so happen that some of these flowered branches, in the exuber- ance of their spirits, stray off so far as to pay a visit to your next door neighbors, these, especially whilst taking the air at their windows, will have no cause to complain of the intrusion. The clianthus — to which you must give, as a support, four rods of white osier tied together — will very scon hide this support under its abun- dant vegetation, adorned with a profusion of flowers of the finest carnation color. If these two shrubs occupied the middle of the balcony, they would take up too much room, and prevent your seeing out ; but, placed at the two angles, they give a little shade, fresh and per- fumed, which contributes to render more delight- ful still those moments of the day that one likes to pass, book in hand, upon the balcony in the midst of flowers. 8 114 THE PARLOR GARDENER. Other Plants. The various ornamental plants of each sea- son — the principal of which I have indicated to you as being suitable for making a show in the garden at the window, at the different expo- sures — can, of course, be made use of in decorat- ing a balcony large enough to serve the purpose of a terrace. Seedling Ranunculuses. If, as I advised, you have amused yourself in rearing in the cold portable greenhouse of your parlor a supply of young roots of the ranun- culus, obtained from seeds, you will, after having used such of these little roots as were requisite for the ornamenting of your flower- stand, have a considerable number of them left. In the spring, when you have no longer cause to dread the appearance of any more last lingering colds, plant this residue of those little roots in one of the boxes on your balcony. They will give you, for a month's time, a profusion of flowers of varied shades, some deep and lively, the others THE PARLOR GARDENER. 115 pale and delicate. The first year, these shades will necessarily be mingled together at hazard. When you come to pull up the roots, after the bloom, you must observe the color of the flowers of each plant, and write these colors in a list, with a number affixed to each color. Prepare papers, in which to wrap the roots, by marking each paper with one of the numbers on your list ; and when you wrap up the roots, for putting by till the following spring, place all of the same color and shade together in one paper, bearing the proper number. By this means, when they are to be planted the second year, you will be enabled to arrange the deep and light colors artis- tically. The deep colors are always the least numerous. Observe, I beg of you, ladies, that if you take care of your ranunculuses when in bloom, water- ing them at the proper times, and do not allow them to be Avasted in bouquets by indiscreet vis- itors, the finest among them will give you a good supply of fertile seed. The plants that you will obtain by sowing these seeds will not reproduce exactly the colors of the parent flowers ; but, by 116 THE PARLOR GARDENER. sowing those seeds only M'hich come from the choicest flowers, you Avill be sure to have a beautiful mixture, presenting the finest shades in proper proportions. Plants propagated in the Portable Greenhouse. The boxes of the great balcony — I suppose them to be large enough — will naturally be the receptacle for the plants reared in your portable greenhouse ; and among these will be your seed- ling pinks, that will all find an appropriate place there. A group of variegated tulips ; another of hyacinths, blue, rose, and pale yellow ; elegant borders of crocuses, which you have taken care to alternate, white, violet, and golden yellow ; — these will enamel yoiir parterre from the very set- ting in of spring. Do not be afraid to multiply by slips your pelargoniums, chrysanthemums, fuchsias, iantanas, and heliotropes, in order that your boxes may be kept constant!}' filled "with plants in flower. You will never have too many, if you be sedulous not to leave empty places in them. With this view, be always careful to sow seeds in the place of the plants you have trans- THE PARLOR GARDENER. 117 planted. You will be surprised to see how very- large a qxiantity of plants a space apparently so small can hold, if you do what is requisite to make each one of your boxes present constantly, from spring to autumn, a full bouquet, rich in its variety of colors and of perfumes. As re- gards perfume, sow mignionette every where. It thrives in the shade of the other plants, takes up but little room, and keeps out of sight, its per- fume only disclosing its presence ; and provided that you take care not to let it exhaust itself in producing too many seeds, — the production of seeds being the business of your garden, — it will continue to bloom until the end of October, hold- ing on till after the first serious freeze. The pre- vious white frosts will then have already killed first the balsams and the Queen ^largarets, then the tagetes and the ageratums of Mexico, after- wards the petunias ; the chrysanthemums alone ■will remain. Then it is that you will congratu- late yourself for having sowed a great deal of mignioiiette. So long as it continues to bloom it will contribute largely — now in a far larger proportion than before — to the pleasantness of 118 THE PARLOR GARDENER. the visits you will continue to pay, in November, to your balcony garden, on the few fine days which the departing year may yet have in store for you. The "Winter Dress of the Balcony Garden. AVinter is decidedly come. Your faithful little mignionette, yielding at length to Mhat the jurists call force majeure, has abandoned you, and dis- appeared from your boxes ; your chrysanthe- mums have taken shelter within doors, that they may there continue to present you with flowers. Now, then, as they can no longer wear their summer garments, give to the bord?rs of your balcony parterre their winter dress, which, though much less variegated, is far from being without charms. Plant there those beautiful tufts of the galanthus, its white flowers bordered with green. Its common name, snowdrop, may perhaps be more familiar to your ears ; and this name its robust temperament fully justifies, for it is en- dowed with a most hardy constitution — one that enables it to bloom bravely between two freez- ings, so that when a pale ray of sunshine comes THE PARLOR GARDENER. 119 to melt a thick layer of snow, one is a^jreeably surprised to tind the snowdrop in full flower. One or two little bushes of Japan quince, some plants of the Christmas rose, two or three hollies, with their variegated leaves, green and white, among which the fruit shines like coral beads, — these will clothe your great balcony with attractions that may tempt you out there to in- hale the wintry air, except on the worst days of this worst of the seasons. You will have re- ceived there from Autumn the last of her flowers as a souvenir of past joys. You will now obtain there, from her grim successor, a present, accept- able in itself, and yet more so as a harbinger of the coming spring. And thus, ladies, the refined and refining pleas- ures which the practice of gardening aff"ords will have been enjoyed by you, in all their variety, without your leaving the house. 120 THE PARLOR GARDENER, CHAPTER XI. THE GARDEN UPON THE TERRACE. The Terrace Garden. — How it takes the Place of a Garden. — Ter- race exposed to the North. — Its TreUised Roof. — Irish Ivj' to cover it. — Shrubs to till the Boxes. — Variegated Holly, Alater- nus (Buckthorn), Rhododendrons, Great Periwinkle. — Terraces of a good Exposure. — Running Plants: Honeysuckle, Clem- atis, Boursault Rose, Bougainville, Chinese Glycine, Virginia Creeper, Buddleya, Clianthus, Delphinium, Hibiscus. - Summer Pruning of the Persian Lilac. — Watering. The Terrace Garden. ryiERRACES on the roofs of houses are not X common with us. I shall, however, not omit what our author says about gardening on terraces ; for, besides that it is very interesting, the flat roofs of extensions and back buildings answer every purpose so far as gardening is con- cerned. Terraces, like the windows of your house, may be exposed to the north, the east, the west, or the south. You already know that, for garden- THE PARLOR GARDENER. 121 ing purposes, the two last exposures are the most favorable ; particularly if your terrace has open space enough before it to permit the air and the sun to reach it without much obstruction. Terrace exposed to the Worth. Let us take the worst hypothesis first : your terrace is fully to the north ; in all other direc- tions it is hemmed in by lofty buildings, so that the sun has the right to visit it the 35th of every month, and then only. You have, however, done very well, ladies, to have a terrace constructed, even under these unfavorable conditions. At its centre have a wooden column erected, which is to sustain a trellised roof consisting of four tri- angidar parts. The Irish ivy will quickly over- run this, covering it Avith its thick verdure. A round table, through the centre of which the column passes, will be a convenience for placing your books and work upon, also for taking breakfast and tea there, when, oppressed w-ithin doors by the heats of summer, you take refuge in the open air, under the shelter afforded by that dense foliage. One side of the terrace being 122 THE PARLOR GARDENER. closed by the wall of the house of which it is an appendage, in which wall are the doors and win- dows opening upon it, erect, at each of the other sides, two arches, from the centres of which vases are to be suspended. Shrubs blooming in the Shade. Just within the balustrade, or the parapet (if it be a parapet) of your terrace, we must have a range of boxes similar to those on the great bal- cony, which, by our joint endeavors, we have been getting all the good out of that we could. This terrace garden of yours being a northern one, its boxes must be filled with heath soil ; and we must rear there shrubs with persistent leaves — variegated hollies, alaterni, rhododendrons. These are among the shrubs which tolerate the shade, and whose robust temperament does not fear the cold, and, with the great perivvinkle for their associate, they will constitute the basis of the decoration of your garden. Add to them whatever ornamental plants I have previously made known to you, as being able to bloom passably well without the help of the sun. THE PARLOR GARDENER- 123 When the heat of the dog claj's renders coolness precious, your friends will be glad to come and partake with you of that which your ivy-clad arbor affords : for three months its freshness will be a source of delightful feelings for them as well as for yourself. Do you say this is no great thing ? Agreed. But, on your side, you Avill have to admit that it is a great deal better than nothing at all, and that, as a general rule, it is wise not to ask of any thing more than it can give you — a rule which, applying as it does to your terrace with a north exposure, as to all other things, must be its protection against ^.unwise exactions. Terraces of a good Exposure. What we have effected, in the way of garden- ing, upon your balconies to the east, west, and south, you have only to repeat on a larger scale, if your terrace garden has one of these exposures. Here, however, is the place for some advice re- specting certain plants, of medium and large size, that we have not been able to cultivate before, for want of room. 124 THE PA II LOR GARDENER. Running and Climbing Plants. That trellis roof, when it has the good fortune to be removed to a terrace with a good exposure, admits of being clad in a garment composed of the most agreeable mixture of climbing and run- ning plants, in place of the Irish ivy, which, in the northern exposure, was its only covering. Do not be afraid, ladies, to vary and multiply these plants ; they will agree very well with each other ; each one Avill take its just share of air and of sun ; each will bloom in its own proper time ; vying with each other, in the most amicable spirit possible, in their jomt task of weaving over your head the most charming canopy that can be conceived. At the corners of your terrace plant honey- suckles, clematis, Boursault roses, and Bougain- ville, to which you may add the glycine of China, and the Virginia creeper. Whilst climb- ing up the pillars that sustain the arches of the trellis, the buddleya and the clianthus will feel entirely at home; nor will they be incom- moded by the company of a tall hollyhock THE PARLOR GARDENER. 125 and a fine Ajax delphinium, attended by two or three hibiscuses.* The room which all these will possess them- selves of, on the balustrade of the terrace, will still leave enough there for yourself when you wish to le^n on it, and look down upon whatever there may be worth seeing below. Summer Pruning of the Persian Ijilac. On terraces having a western or a southern ex- posure, besides the boxes serving as the border beds of your garden, there may be others, of a medium size, for receiving oranges, myrtles, pome- granates, rose laurels, and even a few fine Per- sian lilacs. When the elegant »pring bloom of these last is over, do not omit to subject them to the summer pruning. This is a happy innovation, introduced into our horticulture but a few years ago, and already generally adopted. The process is as follows : — When the flowers of the Persian lilac have faded, we do not, as formerly, content ourselves * The althsea is an hibiscus. 126 THE PARLOR GARDENER. with merely cutting off the bunches from which the flowers have fallen ; we cut off the tops of every branch of the plant, and, moreover, every thing that is green upon it, the lilac thereby find- ing itself stripped entirely — no less perfectly naked than at Christmas. But very soon the in- herent energy with which the Persian lilac is endued manifests itself in a most vigorous vege- tation : young shoots, all of equal length, all equally floriferous for the next year, replace the pruned-off branches; and you have a plant the very best of its kind. A necessary precaution, with respect to lilacs and other shrubs cul- tivated in separate boxes, is, to turn the box partly round twice a week, so that each side of the plant may receive by turns its just share of air and of light. Otherwise the natural j^ropen- sity of plants to grow most vigorously on the best lighted side will cause them to shoot out mostly on one side, whereby the symmetry of their heads would be entirely spoiled, and in the course of a single summer they would be alto- gether deprived of grace. When the boxes are turned often enough, the annual growth cannot get a wrong set. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 127 ■Watering. "When your terrace has a southern exposure, the earth contanied m the boxes formmg the border requires watering two or three times a day ; the heat reflected from the floor of the terrace, especially when of metal, causing a far more rapid evapora- tion than would take place in the borders of a parterre having a similar exposure. These water- ings, the sowing of seeds, sticking slips, trans- planting, removing day by day the faded flowers, and gathering of seeds for next year, will be just so much healthful exercise for you in the open air of your terrace garden. These attentions and this work — of which you must be careful to do no more than you can do Avithout over-fatigue, without occasioning feelings of exhaustion — will imbue you with a taste for ornamental plants ; which, becoming more and more lively as you proceed, will finally expand into a real love, such as that with which we love living beings reared by our care. With your sex it is matter of instinct to love all that is gen- tle, tender, elegant, and graceful. 128 THE PAR LOU GARDEXER. Do not imagine, ladies, that the above is all that the garden on the terrace can yield for you in the shape of pleasure arising from the practice of hor- ticulture ; there is, besides, quite a different series of facts, AAhich you will appreciate if you will tuke the pains to read the folloAving chapter. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 129 CHAPTER XII. FRUITS UPON THE TERRACE. Fruits that ve can have on the Terrace. — Alpine Strawberry.— Buisson de Gaillon. — Virginia Scarlet Strawberry. — Strawberry of Chili. - Superb Wilmot. — Goliah. — Blcton White. — Queen of Great Britain.— The Vine. — Pruning. — Thinning out the Grapes. — Thinning out the Leaves. — Cherry Trees. —Plum Trees. — Currants.— Raspberries. —Forced Fruit on Dwarfs.— Cutting the Dwarf Fruit Trees on the Terrace. — Management of Cherry Trees, Plum Trees, Strawberries, Raspberries. — Form that suits the Raspberry in a Pot on the Terrace. Fruits that it is practicable to have on a Terrace. w HO IS not a little, of an epicure ? Epicu- rism and idleness — the love of those pas- times often called idle — are the least of the seven mortal sins ; as to the others I will say nothing, being averse to dealing in scandal. A little glut- tony as regards fruits is so natural ! As to myself, I cannot honestly deny, and therefore frankly confess, that I sympathize with our mother Eve. 9 130 THE PARLOR GARDENER. The fruits, however, of which I am about to speak, have the merit of not being forbidden ; they are, on the contrarj", among the most ad- missible of things. Now, you are going to ask me if I pretend to make you engage in planting fruit trees on your terrace, such as there — perhaps — were in those famous "Hanging Gardens" of Queen Semira- mis ; which gardens, by the by, — supposing them to have ever existed, — were nothing more nor less than terrace gardens, such as your own ; only, in a degree, — never mind what precise de- gree, — more spacious. I have no such grand enterprise to propose to you, ladies ; no scheme of the sort is in my mind. I desire merely to call your attention to a small number of excellent fruits, of which you can easily have a harvest, — I do not promise that it shall be large enough to load a ship, — iipon your terrace. In the first place, then, an assumption on my part. I assume that your terrace is sufficiently spacious to admit of your border boxes being large enough to afford room for the worship of Pomona, as well as for that already appropriated to Flora ; THE PARLOR GARDENER. 131 and this without the least encroachment upon the rights of the lady last named. This pretty little figure of speech — a perfect statuette, is it not ? — is not original with me : I beg you to understand, ladies, that I lay no claim to its authorship ; it belongs to the late Rousselon, and first appeared in his Annals of Flora and Pomona. Now, — to descend from the airy heights of fancy, and engage in our work upon material realities, — you will find that a few strawberry plants will not be at all in the way of your orna- mental ones. And this being the case, will it not be pleasant to you, while engaged in your horti- cultural labors, to find, now and then, under your hand, a fine, ripe strawberry or two r And these of your own production ! Strawberries. If you open. the catalogue of a horticulturist by profession, you will be frightened at the innumer- able varieties of the strawberry; each variety asserted by the venders to be perfect ; whilst, in point of fact, the fruit produced by the greater part of them will prove to be either flavorless or 132 THE PARLOR GARDENER. sour ; or — in fine, with some defect or other, rendering it not worth cultivating-. I — who am very cautious on this score, and who, as the result of long experience, generally eschew all such — can safely recommend to you, as among the most desirable, the old-fashioned alpine, which is a monthly bearer, the Virginia scarlet, the Chili, and those English varieties called, respectively, AVilmot superb, Goliah, Bicton white, and queen of Great Britain. This last is noted for its ex- traordinary fecundity. It is of the strawberry — mind you — that I state this. You will recol- lect that plants — plants exclusively — constitute the subject of our present discourse ; and you must not let your thoughts stray off into other fields. By adopting these varieties, and planting here and there among your flowers a couple of plants of each of the eight * above named, you will have in all sixteen ; each one of which will give you on an average six fruits. This will be ninety-six strawberries — in round numbers, a * The eighth, being peculiarly a French strawberry, has been omitted. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 133 hundred — that you will enjoy the flavor of, one by one, as they successively ripen, and as the cli- max to the pleasure you will have been experi- encing all the while in watching their growth and ripening. As respects the latter point, great self- control on your part is indispensable. I warn you of this beforehand ; for if, through impa- tience, you gather them too soon, even so much as a single day too soon, you will lose by it, I assure you. Their flavor cannot do justice to its own merits at any point short of the most perfect maturity. Your strawberry plants will require no other attention than that of taking off" the run- ners by which they propagate themselves. As to water, they will take care of themselves, drinking their fill from the supplies placed within their reach in watering the other plants. You must remember to renew them every two years, by means of runners that you will reserve for the purpose. Grape Vine. Of all your fruit-bearers, the one that will yield the most bounteously is the grape. For some years jjast the vine has been a good deal 134 THE PARLOR GARDENER. cultivated in pots, in order that it may be forced \ that is, be compelled to produce fruit long before the time when it will be produced in the open air. liYns forcing consists simply in cultivating the vine in a hothouse, or tempered greenhouse. Buy vines, if you can, all trimmed and ready for bear- ing, and place the pots containing them at the foot of the posts supporting the arches of your terrace arbor. They will there find a suitable support in the situation the most favorable to the ripening of the fruit. Train them so as to make them grow in festoons. In due time grapes will be there, within reach of your hand, hanging in golden bunches, all the way from the base of the pillars up to where the vases are suspended at the centre of the arches. Will not this be charming ? Trimming and Thinning. Two things are indispensable to make your grapes as good as they ought to be — to cut off the top of the vine, which must be done as soon as its young grapes are formed, and as large as a pea, and to thin out the grapes when too thick in the bunch. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 135 This last operation is as follows : When the vine grows in good earth, in a good exposure, and has been skilfully pruned, and when too much fruit — too many bunches — has not been left upon it, each blossom will produce its fruit. As they expand the young grapes crowd each other ; they get squeezed together, and pressed out of shape ; the air and light can get only to those on the outside of the bunch. The conse- quence is, that the bunch has not half the value at market that it would have, had the matter been differently managed. Do you know, ladies, what, in order to avoid this misfortune, is done by the wives and daughters of the gardeners of Tho- mery ? Thomery is a little village where those unrivalled grapes are produced, which are sold at Paris under the name of " grapes of Fontaine- bleau." These women, each armed with a pair of pointed scissors, patiently cut out, from each of those little bunches of which every distinct bunch is composed, one young grape in every three. And this is the way I now advise you to treat all bunches produced by the vines on your terrace. You will, I acknowledge, have but four vines 136 THE PARLOR GARDENER. growing in so many pots, and you may perhaps fancy that the produce, however good in quality, must needs be insignificant in quantity. Let us, then, make a little calculation. Arithmetic, you see, will thrust itself into all human affairs, horti- culture not excepted. Well, then, each one of your four distinct vines will have four main branches, (that are cut down short, say to about six inches in length ;) from each one of these branches there will be two running vines, and each one of these running vines will bear two bunches of grapes. If all turns out well, as you have reason to hope, you will then have to gather in September or October — how many bunches ? Why, if arithmetic be a reliable prophet, you will have no less than sixty-four bunches of grapes. Is not this number large enough to warrant your inviting, if not all your acquaintances, yet at least the whole circle of your most intimate friends, to aid you in the joyous labors of your vintage ? Thinning out the Leaves. About a month before vintage time you will have to perform upon your vines a chirurgical THE PARLOR GARDENER. 137 operation which requires considerable judgment in the execution. By the French it is called ^pamprer, which signifies to unleaf; consisting, as it does, in taking oiF such leaves as prevent the sun from striking directly on the grapes, which solar action is indispensable to tlieir being gilded with their proper rich yellowish hue, and to their possessing that richness of flavor of which this hue is the only guarantee. If the bestowing of all these attentions upon your vines be not an amusement for you, then, — permit me to say it, — you do not deserve to enjoy the eating of a good bunch of chasselas.* Cherry Trees, Plum Trees, Currant Bushes, Raspberries. Are strawberries and grapes all the fruits that you can have on your terrace ? No, certainly. There are beautiful dwarf trees, about the cul- ture of which I am going to give you some hints, which, if you profit by them, will enable you to have, in addition, cherries and Mirabelle plums ; and your variety of terrace garden fruits * It would be well to try this method with otlier grapes. 138 THE PARLOR GARDENER, may be further increased by adding to these dwarf trees a couple of currant bushes, — a white and a red, — and three or four raspberry plants. The dwarf cherries and plums, culti- vated in large pots or in boxes, like the pome- granates and Persian lilacs, will bloom perfectly on the terrace. You can purchase them all pre- pared. They will " load heavily," as the French gardeners yay, and it will be a lively satisfaction to you to gather their ripe fruits, some time before the usual time of their ripening ; for, placed on the terrace, they are in the best of situations for enabling them to work energetically, and force their fruits forward to early maturity. Forced Dwarf Fruit Trees. Is it your desire to have ripe cherries and plums to eat so early as April or May ? — a time when, if you have to buy these fruits, you must pay very extravagant prices for them. If this be your wish, it is very easily gratified. About a fortnight after their leaves have fallen, in autumn, remove your dwarf fruit trees (which I suppose to be in pots) from the terrace into the THE PARLOR GARDENER. 139 house. They will soon begin again to vegetate, and by January or February they will be in bloom, Avhich, of itself, will be very agreeable to you ; and they will ripen their fruits a month or two before those in the open air. To enable them to do this, the only assistance they require from you is to be placed near the windows, and to be turned every day, so that each side may receive its share of light, and to have the air they breathe kept up at a constant tempera- ture of from sixty-two to sixty-three degrees of Fahrenheit's thermometer. This Avill be about the temperature of your room ; the one at which it would be kept as being the most pleasant to yourself, and the best for your health, as well as comfort ; so that you will not be put to any additional expense, nor have to derange your habits in any way for the sake of these dwarf fruit-bearing pets of yours. You see now that fruits, no less than flow- ers, have their part to play on your terrace, although the principal part appertains to the flowers. "When you receive your friends, will it not be very pleasant to have cherries, and cur- 140 THE PARLOR GARDENER. rants, and raspberries to offer them, at a season when they are great rarities in the market, and to be had there only at prices which the Croesuses of the stock exchange can alone afford to pay ? Will not your guests be delighted to assist you in gathering these nice fruits from the tree with their own hands r And, when placed upon your table, as its central ornament, will they not look far more beautiful than if they had been bought with money ? Pruning Fruit Trees on the Terrace. Don't trouble yourselves about pruning your dwarf cherries and plums. The gardeners have a saying, that these trees — whose M'ood always contains a great deal of gum — do not "love the knife ; " they ought, therefore, to have it applied to them as seldom as possible. As seldom as possible is still too often ; in a Avord, so far as they are concerned, keep your pruning-knife in your little gardener's tool-chest ; they will thrive all the better for its being left there — be all the more productive. The raspberries, which are simple shrubs, have THE PAHLOR GARDENER. 141 their own way of vegetating; they are peremiial in their roots only. The annual stalk, after having borne its fruit, dies in autumn ; and it ought then to be cut down level with the earth in the pots. The root puts forth e^'ery year, in great superfluity, young shoots which are des- tined to bear fruit the following year ; and, of these shoots, but three only must be allowed to remain on each plant — that is to say, if you wish to have a good crop of really fine rasp- berries. In the spring, cut off about a quarter from the length of these reserved shoots ; the buds at the middle of the stallv will now develop better than if it had been left entire ; and it is from these buds always that the finest of the fruit comes. Currants require only to be freed from the old wood — that is to say, the exhausted branches, which will no longer bloom, and which, with their tops supported on a single stalk, encumber the inside of the bush. By their being trimmed in this manner, the fruit will come out at a good height, far enough from the earth not to be soiled by the spattering of earthy particles during heavy 142 THE PARLOR GARDENER. showers and waterings ; this, therefore, is the best way of trimming currants on the terrace. Now, ladies, I hope you wiU i^ree that the culture of fruits on your terviKiP, if you keep them in their proper place, h{>s it? m«rit as well as that of the flowers. THE PARLOR GARDENER. 143 CHAPTER XIII. THE DOUBLE WINDOW. Advantages of a Double Window. — Their Use in the North. — The Manner of decorating them. — Glass Stands. —Plants proper for the Double Window. — Grevillea, Kennedia, Blue Lobelia, Ges- neria, Gloxinias, Achimenes, Brunfelsias, Torrenia Asiatics, Ixora, Echmea, Begonias. — Sparniauuia. — Retractility of its Stamens. Advantages of a Double "Window. AFTER having done our gardening in the par- lor, wishing for a little more room in which to pursue it still further, we came out of doors. Here also our work is completed. Let us then go in again. In all countries where Winter brings in his train a long succession of vigorous colds, in order to guard the better against these, the in- habitants, instead of having in their windows bvit a single sash, use the wise precaution of having two — the outer one even with the outside of the 144 THE PARLOR GARDENER. house, the inner one even with the inside wall of the apartment. Thanks to this arrangement, the cold reigning without is so far excluded that a mild temperature is preserved in your chamber, Avhile, at the same time, there remains between the two sashes a vacant space which is at your disposal for any uses to which it is susceptible of being put. It is the very thing for our garden- ing purposes. The English like to keep avadevats there; by the Dutch, this space is dedicated to canary birds, which they understand perfectly how to rear, Holland being the countrj' of all others where these birds do most abound. There is nothing, how-ever, ladies, to prevent you from appropriating it to your favorite pets — flowers. It is evident that whenever the interior sash is kept open, the interval between the two sashes receiving, as it then does, a portion of the atmos- phere of the chamber, will of course be of the same temperature. This space, then, is equiv- alent to a little conservatory, either merely tem- pered or hot, according as the person who occu- pies the chamber is more or less chilly ; and in THE PARLOR GARDENER. 145 this temperature all the cultures that can be con- ducted on a large scale in greenhouses, tempered merely, or hot, are equally possible on a small scale in the double window. Manner of decorating it. Before filling it with flowers, you must suspend there an elegant earthen- ware vase in which to put a plant from the order bi omeliacese * — a Guz- mannia, for instance, the leaves of which plant resemble those of the ananas ; and in the centre of this foliage there appears a flower of so bril-» liant a red that one cannot steadfastly gaze at it without its fatiguing the sight. The size of this vase must be proportioned to the width of the window, and to the dimensions of the plants that you propose to cultivate there. It is best that the small pots which you have at the two sides be supported on shelves formed of panes of glass, because Avooden stands would intercept the light * Order Bromeliacese (the pineapple family) consists of American, and chiefly tropical plants; with rigid and dry channelled leaves, often with a scurfy surface; a mostly adnate perianth of three se- pals and three petals, and six or more stamens; the seeds with mealy albumen. — Gray's Botanical Text Book. 10 146 THE PARLOR GARDENER. too much. I think you would do well to follow, in arranging the plants in the double window, the advice I gave with regard to those in the garden at the window. Plants proper to be placed here. Place on the shelves of the glass stands at the two ends of the Avindow-sill plants of a low and tufted nature : first, on the upper shelves, such as, without being precisely climbing or running plants, are taller than they are broad. There is nothing of this sort more graceful than the shrubs of the genus Grevillea. On the front or lower shelves place small plants which bear many flow- ers, such as the Kennedias and the blue lobelias of Surinam. Arranged in this manner, they will not be in your way when you wish to stand close to the outer sash to look out at the wintry scene, as a contrast to your tropical garden within. Your double window is an excellent place also for making a display of the plants you have ob- tained from seeds and slips reared in the hot portable greenhouse. Your choice is not a lim- ited one by any means. In the course of my THE PARLOR GARDENER. 147 instructions, I name only some of those which I consider as most worthy of your attention. What I shall say in regard to their culture will be a suf- ficient guide to you, should you desire to admit into their society others that require the same temperature. Gesneriacea9. The double window can also lodge, very much at their ease, plants of the order Gesneriacece,* of the three genera, Gesneria, Gloxinia, and Achimenes. I have already had occasion to remark with what perfect docility a leaf, or a mere fragment of a leaf, from a plant of this last named genus will take root when we wish to propagate it by slips. The gloxinias are not less accommodating : their foliage resembles the most beautiful green velvety and their flowers, in the form of a goblet, have in the inside a large spot, which is always of a different shade from the flower itself. The ges- neriacea? require a great deal of water and of heat ; they must be watered several times a day, * Order Gesneriacea?, consisting of tropical herbs, witli green foliage and showy flowers. — Gray's Botanical Text Book. 148 THE PARLOR GARDENER. and whenever you have reason to fear that they may be seriously injured by the cold at night, — which would happen only when it freezes very hard outside, — you will take the precaution of placing them on j'our mantel-piece for the night. Their bloom continues very long, and will fully recompense you for your trouble. Treat in the same way the Brunselsias, the torrenia Asiatica, the yxoras,* the oechmeas, and the small begoni- as, which, in company with each other, inside of your double window, will constitute there a charming little parterre taken from the tropical flora. Sparmannia. Do not forget to add to the above one or two plants of the Sparmannia, a native of the Cape of Good Hope. In thio pretty plant you may observe, while it is in oloom, the phenomenon of retractilitij, — with a contrary effect, however, — which renders the sensitive plant so ciirious. Touch delicately with the end of your finger the summit of the stamens of a flower of Sparman- * There is an interesting history of the yxora in Mrs. Loudon's book. THE PA B, LOR GARDENER. 149 nia in full bloom : instead of modestly closing, in imitation of our gentle mimosa, they will forth- with scatter, spreading out in every direction with a brusque and instantaneous movement. Some time after they will return to their for- mer position. This property of the stamens of the Sparmannia, less generally known than that which manifests itself in the closing of the leaves of the sensitive plant, is not less curious or inter- esting to observe. Forced Strawberries. K you have two or three double windows instead of one, place pots of strawberries upon the glass stands of one of them ; they will bloom in January, and will give, each one, five or six strawberries in February, when out of doors the earth will perhaps yet be hard frozen, or covered with snoAV, and the river will be covered with skaters. At such a time a single strawberry, gathered from a plant forced by your care, in one of your double windows, will have the right to seem supremely delicious to you. 150 THE PARLOR GARDENER. CONCLUSION. AND HERE, my dear ladies, ends the series of notions upon horticulture in the house that I proposed to give you. Can the Parlor Gardener flatter himself with having inspired you with a little interest for those plants that you already loved without knowing it, — for you were pre- disposed by your nature to do so, — and that you will love better and better in proportion as you know them more ? One thing above all ought to have struck you in the course of our discourse : it is, that in all that I have taken the liberty to recommend to you, there is not a single process that each of you cannot practise by your- self; not a single culture that you cannot suc- ceed in by conforming to my hints. Success in our undertakings, whatever the thing may be that we undertake to do, is always pleasure — often happiness. Let us understand each other, however. I do THE PARLOR GARDENER. 151 not pretend that every thing you do will be always crowned with success ; you will often go wrong, and then your attempts will necessarily fall through ; this is inevitable. But this much I can promise, and answer for — that with a little reflection you will always be able to discern the cause of your failure ; and this being seen, you can then begin again, and obtain from a second attempt what you could not from the first. My dear ladies, I shall enjoy the pleasure — in imagination, at least — of seeing you engaged in adorning with these beautiful children of Flora, first your mantel-piece, next your itagtre, then your flower-stand, your balcony, and your terrace, all in due succession. I can picture to myself the liveliness of the satisfaction with ■which you will watch the growth and the opening of the first bud of the first camellia, grafted with your own hand, and that also with which you will gather the first fruit of the first cherry tree that you will have forced under my directions. No doubt the ladies of your ac- quaintance will take pleasure in following your example — this inoff"ensive taste for gardening is 152 THE PARLOR GARDENER. also a growing and spreading thing. Permit me, then, dear ladies, to indulge the hope that there will spring out from all this — amidst the violets and mignionettes — a little kind recollection of The Parlor Gardener. INEEX. A. Alaterne ^ Aquarium Aquarium, construction of «9 Aquarium, parlor ^^ B. Balcony to the East ^^^ Balcony to the North ^^ Balcony to the South ^'^^ Balcony to the West ^^^ Beau, Spanish ^^^ Buddleya ^^'^ Bulbs, choice of them ^^ c. 34 Cactuses Camellias Christmas rose ^^^ Chrysanthemums ^"° Cleaning of plants ^^ (153) 154 INDEX. Clematis 124 Clianthus 112 Cobea 100 Crocus 25 Currants 138 D. Delphinium 125 Di^talis 99 Double window 143 Echinocacti 35 Epamprement 137 Epiuoche 91 Fruits grown on the terrace 129 Fuchsias 116 P^ruit trees, dwarf, forced 138 Flower bulbs 21 G. Galanthus 118 Garden in the apartment 11 Garden on the etagere 31 Garden on the flower-stand 44 Garden on the mantelpiece 20 Garden on the terrace 120 Garden on the window 96 Gesneria 147 Glass shelves 145 INDEX, 155 Gloxinia M7 Glyciue of China 1'34 Grafts a la pontoise BO Grafts of Camellia 84 Grafts of Oranye 80 Grafts, what practicable 78 Greenhouse, cold 56 Greenhouse, warm 73 Grevillea 146 H. Hepatica 99 Hibiscus -. 125 Hollyhock 124 Holly, variegated 122 Honeysuckle 124 Hyacinth, flowering' iu Avater 21 Hydrocharis 92 Hypericum 99 I. Ivy, Irish 98 J. Japan quince 119 Jonquil 24 K. Kenuedia 146 L. Larkspur 125 156 INDEX. Ligatui'es for grafts 8l Lobelia 146 M. Mandevillea suaveolens 48 Melocacti 35 Mesembryanlhemums ^ Miguiouette 1*^2 Mimosa pudica 92 Mimulus 9^ N. Nemophiles ^ Nipping off buds . . . . « ^'^^ P. Pansies 105 Passion flower 4G Pelargoniums 71 Periwinkle 122 Plants boug-ht in floAver 45 Plants for the double window 130 Plants for the flower-stand 45 Plums 137 Pruning- grapes 134 Q. Quince, Japan 119 R. Ranunculus 62 Ranunculus, aquatic 94 INDEX. 157 Raspberry bush 137 Khocliola 5 Kice, grafted d-2 Kose, Bourgaiiiville 124 liose, Boursault 124 s. Sedum (stono-crop) 38 Seed-bed 58 Sempervivum (house-leek) 5 Shrubs, branching .124 Shi-ubs, climbing 124 Slips in the cold portable greenhouse 60 Slips in the warm portable greenhouse 73 Slips of begonia C9 Slips of camellia 7 1 Slips of chrysanthemums 71 Slips of dwai'f succulent plants 68 Slips of leaves 68 Slips of pelargoniums 71 Slips, rose 71 Snow-drop 118 Spanish beans 100 SparmamTia M8 Stapelia 3o Stock gillyflower 102 StraAvberry, Aljiine 132 Strawberry, Chili 132 Strawberry, (xoliah 132 Strawberry, Queen of Great Britain 132 Strawberry, Virginia scarlet 132 Strawberry, Wilmot superb 132 158 INDEX. T. Terrace, balcony 110 Terrace, garden 120 Thinning grapes 134 Thunbergia alata 4H Tomatoes grafted on potatoes 78 V. Yases, hanging 101-104 Vine cultivated in flower pot 133 Violet, double climbing 47 Virginia creeper 124 w. Watering 13 Warmth 16 Winter rose 119 Wood pink . 46 Y. Yxora • *^^ '^^'-'^^V'^^'^^Sk''^^^"^'"^^ ^' ^^^ ^\S: •-.'^^; S4 :^%^M^'^^*^~^-^ '^*^ » \ i 7^3 ,•-'_' «^ -^■'■'*vA%5?