July.
During this month and the next, when the soil is heated by the summer sun, you take cuttings and pipings, and make layers of the plants you wish to strike. Pinks are increased when they have done flowering, but the young shoots of the Carnation are often layered while the older shoots are still in flower.
Daffodil leaves should now come away with a touch, and without injury to the bulbs. Every day this month you should visit your garden with a pair of scissors, and cut off all dead flowers and all annuals that are going to seed. Not one Sweet-pea must be allowed to make a pod, and your Mignonette will have a longer flowering season if you can cut off the green seed-vessels directly they appear. Perhaps you will like some of your Love-in-a-mist to form its handsome seed-pods and sow itself for next year. One pink Canterbury Bell, too, would give you seed enough to fill a big garden; but its seedlings will probably not be pink if you have allowed blue and white ones to grow near it.
When your Lupins, Pyrethrums, and Delphiniums go out of flower, you can either cut off the flowering stems and leave the rest of the plant, or you can cut down the whole plant close to the ground. When you cut down severely you should give a little extra food in the shape of manure, bone-meal, or Clay’s Fertilizer. We did not include Pyrethrums in our short list of perennials, because they are rather capricious: easily managed in some gardens, and bad-tempered in others. Slugs devour them. If they are given to you, and you want to cut them down, do it rather gingerly, and in damp, dull weather. We are not speaking by any orthodox tradition, but out of our own experience, as we have lost many a fine clump through being told that they could be cut down sharply after flowering. In dry weather the operation kills them.