Pot-pourri from a Surrey garden

This is good advice for shrubs or pot-plants, the clean cut being better for the plants ; but I advise that the knife should be on a steel chain a foot or so long, with a good pair of garden hook-shaped scissors at the other end — for the cutting of annuals or lately planted plants with a knife, in light soil, is very much to be avoided. The smallest pull loosens the roots, and immediate death, in hot weather, is the result. Another advantage of knife and scissors together on the chain is JUNE 117 that they are more easy to find when mislaid, or lost in the warm and bushy heart of some plant. June 4:th. — Now, and even a little earlier, is the great pruning-time of the year for all spring-flowering shrubs. No doubt this cutting-out may be especially important in a light soil such as ours, where things flower themselves to death, like pot-bound plants. It is rather tiresome work ; it requires one person to cut out the old wood and slightly cut back the topmost branches with a long- handled nipper, and another to stand at a little distance and give directions. Without this precaution, the tree or shrub would often become lop-sided and unsightly. It is impossible for the man who is cutting to see what should be taken out. Choisya ternata must be gone over and cut back severely, in spite of all one may have gathered from it while in flower. Also with Lilacs, Laburnums, Weigelias, Crab-apples, Double Cherries, Viburnum, and Pyrus japonica, this pruning — at any rate, in light soils — must never be neglected or forgotten. Very often only a little cutting-out is required. If it is done too late, it does more harm than good, and injures next year's bloom. Clematis montana succeeds much better if the young growth is cut off every year, which prevents it from getting tangled and matted, and all going to leaf instead of blossom. It is the same with Honeysuckles and Brooms. We sow the Brooms— white, yellow, and red and yellow — every year. They can always be transplanted when quite young to where they are to flower, and a good supply of young plants is so useful. The bird-boxes this spring have been well used by my little couples. Fly-catchers and Wrens never fail; but this year we have had rather an uncommon bird, a Bed- start, and in the nest are seven eggs, though Bewick asserts that they only lay four or five. The eggs are pretty in colour, like the Hedge-sparrow's. The Bed-start's n8 POT-POURRI FROM A SURREY GARDEN eggs are a little longer and narrower in shape than the Hedge-sparrow's. A pair of Kobins have hatched out three families this year in my greenhouse — fourteen young Eobins ! They began early in March, and built on a top-shelf ; when the little ones were hatched, the old birds were so tame that they did not mind at all our putting the nest into a deep pot and placing it near the window for them to feed their young more conveniently. We also thought that in the pot it would attract less the attention of a terrible bird-killing old cat we have. He stays near a nest, scratching, till the parent birds are in such a frenzy of agitation and fear that they kick the young ones out of the nest ; he then devours them at his leisure.