HORTICULTURAL RESEARCH 

 I. THE PLANTING OF TREES 



By SPENCER PICKERING, F.R.S. 



More than seventy years ago the mind of one of our land- 

 owners in England became impressed with our ignorance of the 

 scientific principles on which the greatest industry of the 

 country— agriculture — was based and from small beginnings, 

 with plants grown in pots, this investigations grew till they 

 acquired a home in the Rothamsted Experiment Station, the 

 prototype of all the experiment stations which have since been 

 established throughout the world. Following at a humble 

 distance, it was the object of those who founded the Woburn 

 Experimental Fruit Farm to attempt for horticulture what Lawes 

 and Gilbert had so ably succeeded in doing for agriculture. 



There are few of us who cannot claim to be horticulturists in 

 the limited sense of having grown a few trees or shrubs ; even 

 such horticulture must have suggested to those of an inquiring 

 mind innumerable questions as to the why and the where- 

 fore of certain practices which are supposed to be right and of 

 others which are supposed to be wrong. Investigation, however, 

 requires time and money; nothing would have been done in 

 the matter if it had not been that there are still landowners in 

 this country who take a broad-minded view of the duties of their 

 position and of their obligation to the cultivators of the land. 

 In founding the Woburn Fruit Farm in 1894, the present Duke 

 of Bedford was only acting up to the traditions of his prede- 

 cessors and it may be interesting to record that a hundred 

 years ago a former Duke was intimately associated with an 

 immediate ancestor (Coke of Norfolk) of the present writer in 

 raising the status of agriculture. 



Exception has been taken more than once to the locality 

 in which the new station is situated ; Kentish fruit-growers, for 

 instance, insisting that it ought to have been established in 

 Kent, growers elsewhere advocating the claims of their own 



280 



