Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: V. PROPAGATION OF PLANTS CUTTINGS, LAYERS, DIVISION, AND SEED. Probably there is no horticultural operation so interesting as that of Propagation. Although I have been at the business now for nearly forty-five years, still there is no part of the work that to me compels such unflagging interest as that of calling into separate existence a dozen, a hundred, or a thousand slips from one plant, or of watching the varied forms of tiny seedling plants when called into separate individual life by the methods used for that purpose. No matter how well able the lover of plants may be to buy them in their full development, they never have the charm that the bantlings of his own raising give. This is particularly the case with amateur florists, who have but a few plants, and who have time enough and interest enough to pet and care for each particular plant. The following instructions in the art of propagation, I trust, will be so plain and simple that the most inexperienced amateur, as well as the young florist, will be able to understand and follow them. The instructions will contain all our most recent experience; and though some of them will be nearly identical with what I have before written on this subject in the Hand-book of Plants, yet there is such additional information (particularly on Rose Propagation) as will be interesting and instructive, I trust, even to such as have already read what I have before written. Propagation By Cuttings. This is the way in which the largest number of plants are propagated. As now understood, this is a simple matter. Formerly no operation in horticulture was more befogged by ignorant pretenders, who, in writing or speaking on the subject, so warped the operation with troublesome conditions as to discourage, not only amateurs in hort...