Combe Royal; John Luscombe, Esq. This place has been long celebrated for its orange and lemon trees, of which an account has appeared in our Volume for 1834, p. 36. We found the trees in the highest order, and covered with abundance of beautiful fruit. There are also excellent collections of all the hardy fruits, and a great many of the more rare and valuable trees and shrubs. All the Citrus tribe are here propagated by cuttings of the young wood, taken off in spring, and cut across at a joint where the wood is beginning to ripen. These are planted in sand, with little or no loam, in a pot prepared as follows: the pot is nearly half-filled with drainage, over which is placed a piece of flat stone fitted to the sides, so as barely to let the water through to the drainage; on this a little sand is put, and the cuttings are then planted in such a manner that the lower end of each cutting is in close contact with the surface of the smooth stone. The pot is then filled up with sand, and placed in gentle heat in a frame, or covered with a hand-glass. With the usual treatment as to water, shading, &c., they root and are fit to transplant in about six weeks. The use of bringing the lower end of the cutting in close contact with the smooth stone, the gardener thinks, or has been told, is to exclude the air from the pith. Planted in sand well drained, without a flat stone, they do not root nearly so soon, and some of them not at all. We should be inclined to think that the chief use of the stone was to prevent the sand from being washed through the drainage, so as to leave the lower end of the cutting loose; since nothing contributes more to the striking of a cutting, or of a newly transplanted seedling plant, than pressing the soil firmly to its lower extremity. Perhaps this very pressure may operate by excluding the air, and causing those exudations to granulate and form spongioles, which would otherwise be dissipated in or absorbed by the loose soil; and, if so, the gardener (whose name we neglected to take down) is right.
