HARDY PLANTS IN WINTER.

Patea Mail, 24 July 1882, Page 4

HARDY PLANTS IN WINTER.

This is a large subject, but our purpose is to treat only of a part of it —the provision of some good and useful plants for the winter. It is now a common practice to build gr-een-houscs to villa residences; many of them, we regret to say. of a poor character, and unfitted to grow plants satisfactorily. The only chance of having something pleasant to look upon in one of the houses is by potting up some useful hardy evergreens, and furnishing the house with them. It is not too late to do this, provided, it can be done at once, and the plants empiloyed for the purpose be full of fibrous roots. We can name a few useful subjects for the purpose as follow : —Ancuba japonica, Christmas roses, Aralia japonica, Veronica andersoni and its variegated variety the larger leaved Megaseas, or saxifragasi Agapanthus umbellatus, Aspidistra lurida varigata, rhododendron ponticum retinospos sweet bay, hardy succulents; and, indeed’ anything of a similar character, and of which there is a large selection. For potting purposes clean, sweet pots should be used, and a good sweet yellow loam, with a little well-decomposed leaf manure—leaf mould and sand—mixed with it. The pots should ■be well drained, so that water can pass freely from the soil when it is given, as -many plants arc injured by having a cold, wet, soddened soil about the roots in winter. A great deal of water is not required in winter; what is required is that the plants be kept clean and healthy, and the leaves fresh and green. Such plants need to be potted once only in two or three years; but each season when the plants arc not repotted, a portion of the surface soil should be removed and some fresh added. A little liquid manure given during the summer, or, failing this, the sprinkling of a little guano or patent manure on the surface of the soil, will be found of great advantage. The plants must be judiciously pruned as required, and, treated in this way, two or three dozen plants can be made to do excellent service in a cold house, and they will last for years. —Land and Water.