It is difficult, we know, in a period of fantastic
surrirher heat, to wallow in December snows ; but the Christma bulb bowl is best prepared in August. Soine quaint advice on the subject is given in a very practical book (Room and
Window Gardening, Dent, 55.) published some months ago. Mr. Wright recommends the growing of a single bulb in a
small bowl, and he inserts the small bowl in a bigger. The space between the two is packed tight and this enables -sup- porting sticks to be firmly- fixed. It is one of the common
troubles that the loose fibre will not give hold to any firm support, and hyacinths are apt to drop their comely heads. The habit of growing bulbs in bowls was an art and practice unknown to the Victorians. They grew them
either in neat water or in carefully drained pots. The use of fibre in a bowl that allows no escape for the water was, it
appears, invented by a Birmingham florist at the end of the nineteenth century ; and his bulbs became the rage : All can grow the flower now for all have got "—the secret. The English bulli'growers of South Lincolnshire and elsewhere specialise in such winter flowering bulbs.
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