If you are planting roses, remember that two or three, carefully planted in good stuff that goes deep, will pay you better than six times the number stuck _into a hole_ in cold clay or sand or builders' rubbish, and left to push their rootlets as best they can, or perish in the attempt. Spread out these rootlets very tenderly when planting. You will reap the reward of your gentleness in flowers. Rose roots don't like being squeezed, like a Chinese lady's feet. I was taught this by one who knows,--He has a good name for the briar suckers and sprouts which I hope you carefully cut off from your grafted roses,--He calls it "the old Adam!" Yours, &c. LETTER III. A good rule Is a good tool. DEAR LITTLE FRIEND, January is not a month in which you are likely to be doing much in your little garden. Possibly a wet blanket of snow lies thick and white over all its hopes and anxieties. No doubt you made all tidy, and some things warm, for the winter, in the delicious opportunities of S. Luke's and S. Martin's little summers, and, like the amusing American I told you of, "turned away writing _resurgam_ on the gate-post." I write _resurgam_ on labels, and put them wherever bulbs lie buried, or such herbaceous treasures as die down, and are, in consequence, too often treated as mere mortal remains of the departed, by the undiscriminating hand of the jobbing gardener. Winter is a good time to make plans, and to put them down in your Garden-book. Have you a Garden-book? A note-book, I mean, devoted to garden memoranda. It is a very useful kind of commonplace book, and soon becomes as fascinating as autumn and spring catalogues. One has to learn to manage even a Little Garden chiefly by experience, which is slow teaching, if sure. Books and gardeners are helpful; but, like other doctors, they differ. I think one is often slower to learn anything than one need be, from not making at once for first principles. If one knew more of these, it would be easier to apply one's own experience, and to decide amid conflicting advice. Here are a few rough and ready "first principles" for you. _Hardy flowers in hedges and ditches are partly fed, and are also covered from cold and heat, and winds, and drought, by fallen leaves and refuse. Hardy flowers in gardens have all this tidied away from them, and, being left somewhat hungry and naked in proportion, are all the better for an occasional top-dressing and mulching, especially in autumn._ It is not absolutely necessary to turn a flower border upside down and dig it over every year. It may (for some years at any rate), if you find this more convenient, be treated on the hedge system, and _fed from the top_; thinning big clumps, pulling up weeds, moving and removing in detail.