In Holland and Flanders, at the present day, the Pine Apple is never grown in any other manner than in pits and hot-beds. The crowns and suckers are struck and forwarded, from three to six, or nine months, in hot-beds, and afterwards removed to pits. These pits differ from ours in being rather steeper in the roof, and generally the fruiting pits have a passage at the back, with a flue against the back wall, and an entrance door to the passage at one end. In some the passage and flue are in front, and in others a passage and flue are conducted round the house, leaving the pit in the middle; but this is rather an uncommon form, and chiefly to be met with in pits or stoves for ornamental plants. The fuel in general use is peat, and the glass is well covered with boards and matting or canvas or thatch every night after sun-set, excepting in the warmest part of the season.
The soil used by the Dutch is good garden earth, mixed with a third part of well-rotten hot-bed dung, or cow dung, and a sufficient quantity of sand to render it free and pervious to moisture. The gardeners there are by no means so particular in the article of soil, as many are in this country; their object seems to be to make it rich and free; without being very anxious as to employing virgin soil only, or any particular kind of dung. They generally, however, keep the mixture some time in heaps, and turn it over once or twice before using it. At the same time we have seen them shifting Pines, and using a black rich earth newly dug out of an adjoining plot of turnips; only mixing it with a little rotten dung and white sand.
They shift their plants in spring, and refresh the surfaces of the pots in autumn, and they seem on the whole to fruit them in larger pots than we do; but they leave off shifting them nine or ten months before the fruit is expected to appear, wishing to have the pots filled with roots at this crisis. They seldom fruit a crown plant under two years, and more generally three, from the time it is taken from the fruit; large suckers they fruit earlier, according to their size when taken off the mother plant; some which come out from near the bottom of the stem they earth up, and do not take off at all. These come early into fruit, but it is not large.
Sect. II.
Culture of the Pine Apple in Germany.
The Germans took their horticulture from the Dutch, as they did their landscape gardening from the French. They seem to have tried the culture of the Pine Apple almost immediately after its introduction to Holland; for, according to Beckmann, it was ripened by Dr. Kaltschmidt at Breslaw in 1702, who sent some fruit to the Imperial Court; but he states also that its culture was first attempted by Baron Munchausen, a great encourager of gardening, and a botanist who had a fine demesne and garden at Schwobber, near Hamelin, in Westphalia. From the account of these gardens in the Neuremberg Hesperides, they appear to have been grown both in pits, and on stages in larger houses.
The king of Prussia grew the Pine Apple extensively at Potsdam; he followed the Dutch manner in every thing, and had a gardener from that country who attended exclusively to the forcing department at Sans Souci. The quantity of glass there was greater than any where else in Germany: the whole was kept in high order and good culture for many years; but after the king’s death, in 1786, it soon fell into neglect; the glass of most of the peach-houses and vineries was removed or destroyed; the Pine plants were neglected and diminished in numbers, from time to time. In 1813 the royal gardens at Sans Souci contained only about two dozen of Pine plants, which were kept in a lofty opaque roofed conservatory, and these, as may be easily imagined, were by no means in a thriving condition.
Before the French Revolution, the Pine Apple was cultivated at most of the court gardens in Germany; but in the year 1814, there were very few in the empire.
Sect. III.
Culture of the Pine Apple in Russia.
The Pine Apple is extensively cultivated in the imperial gardens in the neighbourhood of Petersburg and Moscow, and also in those of a few of the greatest nobility and mercantile men adjoining those cities. Nothing can be more wonderful than to contemplate the resources by which this plant, requiring not less than from 50 to 70 degrees of heat at all times of the year, is preserved in existence through a winter of seven months, during the whole of which the ground is covered with snow, and Fahrenheit’s thermometer, often for weeks together, at 20° below Zero.
The head gardeners of the emperor, and the great nobles of Russia, are, for the greater part, Britons; and the sort of houses they erect, and the mode of culture they follow, is as nearly as circumstances will admit, those of Speechly or Nicol.