Page:The Amateur's Greenhouse and Conservatory.djvu/70

64 regular routine work, and the amateur who loves plant growing will be ambitious of distinction in this part of the business. It must be confessed, however, that to take a young plant from the hands of a nurseryman, and by careful management developedevelop [sic] its full capabilities so that in due time&mdash;it may be but a few months or it may be many years&mdash;that plant shall have become a noble specimen, is a task far more worthy of an amateur’s ambition. We can always buy plants to begin with, but we must acquire by patience and perseverance the skill requisite to the development of their beauties. One of the first requisites to success in the multiplication of plants is a propagating house or pit. It is customary to enclose, by means of a glass screen, a small portion of the warmest end of a stove or greenhouse for this purpose, and to ensure bottom-heat by means of a shallow tank covered with slates, the water in the tanks being heated. by conducting through it the flow-pipe at the point where the latter is connected with the boiler. But almost any amount of propagating may be done without any special arrangement of this sort, especially in a garden where a hotbed is made up in spring, and advantage is taken of the natural heat of the earth in the later portion of the summer season. Frames and pits are valuable auxiliaries to the greenhouse, and, indeed, there can be but little done without them where soft-wooded plants, notable for an abundant production of flowers, are held in favour. The grower of hard-wooded plants and succulents will have much less need of them. Hand lights, bell glasses, and the propagating boxes made of cheap tile-ware, may be rendered serviceable at all seasons of the year in the multiplication of plants, and the enthusiastic plant-grower will soon learn how to make them repay their cost a dozen times over every year. The necessity for such contrivances arises out of the fact that a moist, warm soil, and a still, moist, warm atmosphere, are peculiarly favourable to the germination of seeds and the rooting of cuttings, and if the amateur will always bear this fact in mind, the business of propagating will be no longer a perplexity and a worry, but one of the most delightful amusements.

In sowing seeds select the compost in which it is recommended the plants should be grown, and add about a fourth part of its bulk of sand to it. Shallow pans are useful things for seeds, but wooden boxes answer equally well. The depth seeds are sown is regulated by their sizes: those as large as a pea may