Page:The Amateur's Greenhouse and Conservatory.djvu/181

Rh camellias in houses that admit of full daylight, must adopt some effectual method of screening them from the sun from the 1st of March to the 1st of September. Hartley&rsquo;s rough plate will be found invaluable for the top lights of a house in which camellias are to be grown, as this excludes sunshine, yet admits the ordinary daylight without interruption. As a rule a lean-to is preferable to a span-house for camellias, and if there is no method of shading adopted in the original plan of the structure, the roof must be furnished with a roller blind, or tiffany must be put up in loose bag-like folds, thus—



Or the inelegant plan of smearing the glass with size and whitening must be adopted. This last is a rough and ready way of shading which costs nothing beyond the time of preparing it, and is very effectual. Our camellia house is in rather too sunny a situation, and we have rendered the employment of temporary shading unnecessary by stippling the glass lightly with pale green-coloured paint.

The camellia house need not be very freely ventilated; during the early period of the year they do not need much air, and though they can scarcely have too much during summer and autumn, ventilators and doors may then be left open night and day, or the plants may be set outside to ripen the wood and perfect the flower-buds. Old greenhouses that are dark and defective of ventilation, and therefore unsuitable for such plants as the erica and epacris, may be made good use of for the culture of camellias. Though camellias may be grown in unheated structures, it is far preferable to heat the house with hot-water pipes or a tank, so as to be able to raise the temperature to 60° during the severest frost, as we sometimes have the coldest weather of the whole year just as the first batch of camellias is coming into bloom and in any case there should be the means of keeping out frost, which is never a benefit to the plants, though they can bear half a dozen degrees with impunity if the wood is ripe.

We prefer to keep camellias under glass the whole year round, and feel inclined to pronounce vigorously against putting