supply the horticultural wants of nations by
the multiplication of botanical rarities. The
first house—devoted to cuttings alone of
tender plants—reveals some curious facts.
Certain plants seem to be averse to the painful
process of subdivision, becoming pallid
after the torture of the knife. Phylatron
Bojerianum, when made into cuttings, is apt
to turn to the hue of a whited sepulchre.
The conifers are inclined to be troublesome.
Araucaria cuttings should be kept awhile
before planting, to allow the turpentine to
exude. Again, conifer cuttings cannot be
taken indiscriminately from any part of the
tree to be propagated. Cuttings from the
side-shoots of Thuja Donniana, for instance,
make plants that spread themselves out flat,
as if they were crucified. Their shape
resembles that of the lower branch of a spruce
or silver fir broken otf and stuck upright
into the ground. An interesting Araucaria
is A. Cookii, so named after Captain Cook.
When the great navigator first saw New
Caledonia, he observed objects on the coast
which might have been the tall chimneys
used by an industrial and manufacturing
people. They proved to be trees of this
Araucaria, which runs up straight, thick, and
solid, so as to give it the look of a pile of
masonry at a distance. Less rare Araucarias,
as A. imbricata, the monkey's puzzle, of
which we have remarkable specimens at
Dropmore and Kew, are mostly raised from
seeds out of imported cones. With numerous
other vegetable tit-bits, V. H. is alimented
from England. He fully acknowledges the
riches and abilities of our collectors and their
employers, and considers himself fortunate in
being located so near to Great Britain. Fifty
pounds sterling for a camellia from
England is a price which bespeaks sincere
appreciation. I witnessed the arrival of some
well-deported, if not illustrious strangers,
who exhibited the straightforward uprightness
of Irish yews. Araucaria Bidwelli, from
England, and its like, are complimented by
being called English plants, although, of
course, they are natives of the southern
hemisphere.

The second propagating house, also heated,
is used for grafting and layering. Here you
see grafted rhododendrons, in pots plunged to
the brim in penitential ashes; layers of
variegated-leaved Hoya carnosa crawling over
the ground (tan and ashes), like broken-
backed snakes, and pinned to the earth at
every joint of their vertebræ; and tiny
cactuses, bristling their tender prickles, like
inoffensive new-born hedgehogs, as yet to be
handled with impunity. The third plant-
fabricator works away at cuttings and grafts
of out-door conifers, geraniums, verbenas, and
that whole host of bedding things, which are
absorbed by European gardens in numbers
that baffle all calculation, or even guess.
Innumerable cuttings pertly rear their pretty
little heads in boxes covered with a pane of
glass, and having the earth they are to strike
in covered with light sand. The fourth is a
sort of eccaleobion for rousing the dormant
vitality of seeds, and for making them open
their folded cotyledons, as the wings on
which they are to flutter into life. Little
broods of seedlings are thus raised in round
earthen pans; in the earliest possible stage
of their babyhood, they are pricked out into
other earthen pans, to be transferred to
thumb-pots at the proper age, soon after
which shift they are marketable.

In great commercial gardens, like these, a
very striking circumstance is the brevity of
the stay made by the myriads of plants there.
They are here to-day and gone to-morrow.
They are hurried into the world, only to be
hurried out of the nursery, as fast as possible.
They are watched and tended day and night,
like infant heirs and princes imperial; they
are warmly housed under crystal globes, they
are bathed in genial vapour-baths, they are
refreshed with draughts of tempered and
medicated waters; and then, as soon as they
can stand alone, they are sent out to seek
their fortune. Their owner hates the very
sight of them, if they linger too long within
his precincts. From them, as from full-
fledged eaglets, parental care is withdrawn the
moment they can get on without it. The
great nurseries of Europe are as prolific as
codfish; their offspring are numbered by tens
of millions. In the third or fourth
generation their seedlings and cuttings would
amount to lines of figures long enough to
serve the earth as a belly-band. This countless
horticultural fry, once fairly hatched,
spreads itself in fish-like shoals over an
extent which may partially be comprehended
from the fact that Russia, Australia, North
America, New Zealand, Ascension Island, and
India, are markets and recipients. One
afternoon, at V. H.'s, three nice little parcels
were sent off at the same time for Worms,
Genoa, and Rio Janeiro. In private gardens,
people plant a plant as they marry a wife,
to love and to cherish it. There is an understood
union between the man and the vegetable
for better, for worse, in sickness and in
health, so long as they both shall live;
unless some intolerable fault or defect leads to
a divorce in the shape of a stubbing-up and
a contemptuous tossing over the hedge.
The nurseryman plants a plant to divide, to
subdivide, to propagate, and what we should
call to spoil it, in all sorts of ways: to bud,
to graft, to layer, to inarch, to take cuttings
from the top, and offsets from the root, to
pull it to atoms (if the atoms will but live
and grow, as sometimes happens); in short,
to sell. Consequently, the nurseryman's
attachments are fleeting,—almost cynical.
He makes acquaintance, rather than forms a
friendship, with his subjects. "How do you
do?" is followed by "Good-bye!" with the
greatest expedition consistent with vegetable
physiology. "Come into the house, my little