If you wish to raise flowers for the sake of flowers, not as decorations, make the flower-beds in the back yard or at the side of the house.
Plants may be grown from seeds or from bulbs or from cuttings. The rooting of cuttings is an interesting task to all who are fond of flowers. Those who have no greenhouse and who wish to root cuttings of geraniums, roses, and other plants may do so in the following way. Take a shallow pan, an old-fashioned milk pan for instance, fill it nearly full of clean sand, and then wet the sand thoroughly. Stick the cuttings thickly into this wet sand, set the pan in a warm, sunny window, and keep the sand in the same water-soaked condition. Most cuttings will root well in a few weeks and may then be set into small flower-pots. Cuttings of tea roses should have two or three joints and be taken from a stem that has just made a flower. Allow one of the rose leaves to remain at the top of the cutting. Stick this cutting into the sand and it will root in about four weeks. Cuttings of Cape jasmine may be rooted in the same way. Some geraniums, the rose geranium for example, may be grown from cuttings of the roots.
Fig. 98. Repotting
Fig. 99. A Clematis
Bulbs are simply the lower ends of the leaves of a plant wrapped tightly around one another and inclosing the bud that makes the future flower-stalk. The hyacinth, the narcissus, and the common garden onion are examples of bulbous plants. The flat part at the bottom of the bulb is the stem of the plant reduced to a flat disk, and between each two adjacent leaves on this flat stem there is a bud, just as above-ground there is a bud at the base of a leaf. These buds on the stem of the bulb rarely grow, however, unless forced to do so artificially. The number of bulbs may be greatly increased by making these buds grow and form other bulbs. In increasing hyacinths the matured bulbs are dug in the spring, and the under part of the flat stem is carefully scraped away to expose the base of the buds. The bulbs are then put in heaps and covered with sand. In a few weeks each bud has formed a little bulb. The gardener plants the whole together to grow one season, after which the little bulbs are separated and grown into full-sized bulbs for sale. Other bulbs, like the narcissus or the daffodil, form new bulbs that separate without being scraped.
There are some other plants which have underground parts that are commonly called bulbs but which are not bulbs at all; for example, the gladiolus and the caladium, or elephant's ear. Their underground parts are bulblike in shape, but are really solid flattened stems with eyes like the underground stem of the Irish potato. These parts are called corms. They may be cut into pieces like the potato and each part will grow.
The dahlia makes a mass of roots that look greatly like sweet potatoes, but there are no eyes on them as there are on the sweet potato. The only eyes are on the base of the stem to which they are joined. They may be sprouted like sweet potatoes and then soft cuttings made of the green shoots, after which they may be rooted in the greenhouse and later planted in pots.
There are many perennial plants that will bloom the first season when grown from the seed, though such seedlings are seldom so good as the plants from which they came. They are generally used to originate new varieties. Seeds of the dahlia, for instance, can be sowed in a box in a warm room in early March, potted as soon as the plants are large enough to handle, and finally planted in the garden when the weather is warm. They will bloom nearly as soon as plants grown by dividing the roots or from cuttings.