CHAPTER III.. The étagère Garden.

THE ÉTAGÈRE GARDEN.

Gardening on the Étagère.--Succulent Plants.--Peculiarities of their Organization.--Dwarf Succulent Plants.--Quantity of Earth of which they have need.--Aliments that they draw from the Air.--Cactus.--Opuntias, (Prickly Pear.)--Melocacti, (Melon Thistle.)--Echinocacti.--How the Goats of Jamaica make them drop their thorns.--Stapelias.--Strange Shape of the Flower.--Its Smell.--Proof of the Sense of Smell in Flies.--Sedums.--Mesembryanthemums.--Ice Plants.--Crassulas.--Culture of Dwarf Succulent Plants.--Necessity of depriving them of Water during their Sleep.

Gardening on the Étagère.

It is but a few years since the fashion of étagères has become general. People began by covering them with all sorts of curiosities and specimens of natural history--a custom which exists still. Then they fabricated out of wire, gilt, silvered or bronzed, charming little étagères in open work, which took up little room, could be hung up any where, and hold a whole collection of little ornamental plants.

This series of plants belongs, for the most part, to an order of vegetation having a very peculiar organization, and endowed with extraordinary vital energy. They are commonly called succulent plants, and are remarkable for the thickness of their fleshy and persistent leaves. Among a great many of these plants, the stalk and the leaves are one and the same organ: the leaves, when leaves exist, fulfil the functions of the stalk; and reciprocally, when the leaves are wanting, their vegetative duties are fulfilled by the stalk.

Dwarf Succulent Plants.

You have no idea, my dear madam, how much skill and patience the horticulturists by profession have displayed in dwarfing these pretty plants; some of which, when left to follow their own notions, in their native country, attain to colossal dimensions.

Quantity of Earth requisite for Dwarf Succulent Plants.

A fact which, above all others, must strike us in examining a collection of dwarf succulent plants, is the extremely small quantity of earth allowed to them. Of those which come most properly under this head, some will live in pots of the size of an ordinary tumbler; whilst others are cooped up in still narrower lodgings, their domicile not exceeding the dimensions of a small wine glass. It is because in general the succulent plants, dwarfed or not, scarcely live by their roots. Then, you will say, on what do they live? They sustain themselves on an aliment with which neither you nor I would content ourselves; they live on the air of the heavens--literally, and without rhetorical figure. By the way, permit me to remark to you, that all plants, without exception, live more or less on the air; even those which derive the greater part of their nourishment from the earth.

Suppose some immense tree felled, split, and cut up into small pieces, and converted into charcoal; it would make an enormous mass of it. Do you imagine that the tree could have drawn this mass of carbon from the soil where it grew, which does not contain a particle of carbon in its composition? No, it drew this material from the atmosphere, by decomposing the air with its leaves. That is what our pretty little dwarf succulent plants do; and without this faculty, which they possess in a very high degree, they would not live.

Cactus--Opuntias.

Consider first those which belong to the numerous and strange family of the cactuses; all of them natives of the warmest parts of America. See the opuntias, whose leaf-stems, or stem-leaves, whichever you please to call them, have the form of so many battledoors placed alongside of each other. These little plants represent to you in miniature those on which, in Mexico and in the Island of Madeira, lives the insect called cochineal, that furnishes to dyers and painters their finest red, under the name of carmine; from which also, by the by, is made that rouge which occasionally serves in giving color to the complexion of ladies towards whom mother Nature was stingy when she painted their cheeks. I do not mean, however, my dear young ladies, to intimate that this was, by any means, the case with either of you.

Melocacti and Echinocacti.

To the same family belong also the melocacti and echinocacti. Their rounded forms composed of prominent ridges, their pretty crown of little satiny flowers, of a fine golden yellow, resemble those of no other family. In the mountains of the interior of Brazil, and in those of the centre of the Island of Jamaica, these same plants,--plants of the same species,--that you here see reduced to such exceedingly small proportions, grow upon the slopes of the most arid rocks, and become very large. Knowing this, you will understand that their bunches of thorns, inoffensive in the dwarfed plants because of their minute size, constitute defensive weapons whereby they are preserved from the teeth of animals. Nevertheless, these arms prove useless to them against the wily attacks of the numerous herds of goats kept by the English colonists of Jamaica. The goats, animals essentially climbers by nature, climb up the most abrupt declivities of the rocks covered with melocacti and echinocacti. There, using their horns for the purpose, they root up these plants, and roll them down into the valley, where, as a preparation for eating them, they play with them as a child would play with a toy balloon, until, by dint of rolling and tossing them about on the pebbles, the thorns have been all shaken out. Then the goats are able to feast upon them without damage to their mouths, just as though the thorns of the colossal cactuses were as little to be dreaded as are these downy representatives of those hard and tough spikes, produced by their sisters in miniature.

Stapelias.

There are other plants, of a different family, but the forms of which recall those of the cactuses: these are the stapelias. You will not fail to remark their strange flowers--thick, fleshy, violaceous, set with rough hairs, and having the form of a star. Do not approach too near this plant while it is in flower; for its odor is not agreeable. This peculiarity, however, should not induce you to exclude it from your étagère, where it will be very well placed, because of the singularity of its form. As to its smell,--which is not strong enough to incommode you,--I should not have mentioned it, but for the circumstance of its having caused this flower to be mistaken for a very different thing by the flies called flesh-flies; which mistake has given rise to quite a curious observation in natural history.

Have flies noses? you will say, ladies.

I must acknowledge that I do not know whether they have or have not noses; although entomology, together with botany, are my favorite studies. This much, however, I do know--that they have the sense of smell. That this is certain you can ascertain for yourselves, by having a stapelia in bloom upon your étagère. The flower of the stapelia smells like meat that has been kept too long; and flesh-flies, who lay their eggs on spoiled meat, are attracted to this flower by its smell. These eggs give birth to worms destined to become flies in their turn. If you shut flesh-flies up in a chamber where there is a stapelia flower, they will come and lay eggs on this flower, taking it for flesh--an error which they cannot be led into by the sense of sight, for the stapelia flower does not resemble in any respect a piece of meat. Consequently this mistake can only arise from their being deceived by the smell; from which fact naturalists draw the conclusion, not that they have noses, but that they have the sense of smell.

Sedums and Mesembryanthemums.

There is another family of plants, no less various, no less rich in pretty and copiously flowering species, than the cactus family itself. These are the sedums; among which I have already made you acquainted with the pretty, yellow, star-flowered sedum, (stone-crop,) which blooms without earth and without water, suspended by a thread to the wall of a room.

Another species, that of the mesembryanthemums,--with numerous flowers of all the shades of red, from the color of fire to the palest rose,--belongs also to the series of succulent plants. The prettiest varieties have been rendered dwarf by the horticulture of our day. If their name--a little long and a little learned--seems disagreeable to you to pronounce, call them plainly ice-plants. This is the common name of the variety that is the most extensively cultivated, and the leaves of which, with the stalk also, are powdered white, as if covered with frost.

There are also the crassulas, with their leaves elegantly imbricated, and their little bunches of flowers of the deepest red. You will find some, also, of a pale rose-color. Both are as perfect in form, and as brilliant in color, as the same plants are in their natural dimensions, of half a yard or more in height.

I pass over some of the best. But when you have made your choice among the prettiest dwarf varieties of cactuses--of the kinds of opuntia, melocactus, echinocactus,--and when you have added to these stapelias, sedums, ice-plants, and crassulas, confining yourself to the finest varieties,--you will have not only a sufficiency to decorate your étagère, even if it be a large one, but also enough to fill an elegant basket, which will produce the best effect in the middle of your stand. And then, during more than half of the year, you will constantly have some of your dwarf succulent plants covered with pretty flowers.

Culture of the Dwarf Succulent Plants.

It only remains to give you some hints about the way of managing them. For this purpose it is necessary to say a few words about their temperament. Cactuses, in their native country, bear excessive heat and dryness for six or seven months without interruption, followed by deluges of rain. The most violent storm-rains in our latitudes afford but a very faint idea of those tropical deluges. During the dry season, the vegetative life of the cactuses is almost quite suspended. Their sleep is then much more profound than that of the plants with us which lose their leaves in winter. Now, from the knowledge of these facts, we perceive what sort of management is most suitable for them. All those which give no sign of active vegetation--on which neither young shoots nor flower buds make their appearance--ought to be watered only once a week. You may abstain altogether from watering them; there will be neither more nor less budding for it when the proper time comes. Continue the same treatment if, at the return of warm weather, the cactuses show no signs of flowering: leave them dry a month or two; they will not die for it--no danger of this. When they begin spontaneously to vegetate, begin to water them with water of the temperature of the room; at first moderately, afterwards a little more freely, but never to excess. The floods of rain that they get in their native country do not hurt them there, because the tropical climate renders evaporation rapid. It would not be the same in your house. The quantity should be, a tablespoonful of water for the pots of the size of a tumbler, and a teaspoonful for those the size of a wine-glass.

Necessity of depriving them of Water during their Sleep.

That you may perfectly understand the necessity of not watering your cactuses during the sleep of their vegetation, I will relate to you what happened to a botanist, who, being extremely fond of cactuses, had a very fine collection of them. A friend sent him a box of cactuses from the province of Minas Geraes, in Brazil, which he hastened to put in pots in his conservatory, and at the same time put by in a drawer a double set of specimens, which he proposed to make presents of. Forced to set out on a long journey, he forgot the cactuses in his drawer; and on his return home, after an absence of several months, he found them there, faded, withered, in so deplorable a state that he thought them lost. Nevertheless, he planted them, and began to water them by degrees. All recovered and flowered abundantly; while those which had been planted, and taken care of ever since their arrival, only flowered in part; many did not flower at all. His gardener had been afraid of letting them suffer from thirst, and had given them too much to drink.

Keep in mind, then, ladies, that in order that your cactuses may bloom, it is necessary that the periodic sleep of their vegetation should be complete; and that it cannot be so if they be watered at the wrong time. As to temperature, they are of a temperament that accommodates itself very well with what suits yourself. When they bloom during the warm weather, put the étagère before the open window some hours every day; your cactuses will be the better for it; their bloom will be more brilliant and of longer duration.

The stapelias must be treated like the cactuses--no difference. The other succulent plants require a little more water in winter; their sleep being never so absolute as that of the cactuses and stapelias. Nevertheless, if you would have them to flower well when they wake, let them sleep. Do not water them during their sleep, except when they appear evidently to be suffering from thirst; and then give them only just so much as is necessary to relieve their suffering.