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strongest in seedlings; and, llierefore, as we value the products of our 

 ti-ees, we should not lightly thrust aside their main prop. Habit is 

 (almost) everything, and if our trees, generation after generation, are 

 to be worked from highly forced, root-grafted, nursery trees, which are 

 often little better than rooted cuttings or more properly leaf-buds far 

 removed from seedlings, or fruit buds, we must not wonder if a habit of 

 growing instead of bearing, there acquired and thus ingrained, predomi- 

 nates ever after. Like produces like, seedlings produce seeds, at least 

 with whatever of fruit may be wrapped around them, while leaf-buds 

 thus stereotyped, incline to produce leaf-buds alone. Though deeply 

 conscious of our horticultural inferiority here at the West ; this lesson I 

 think we have learned by experience, and if our Eastern friends have not, 

 I would barely suggest, that it might possibly be because their ancestors 

 were not skilled in commercial gardening, especially the great art of root 

 grafting ! Justice, however, requires the acknowledgment in this connec- 

 tion, of our own faults — if such they shall prove to be — that root-grafting 

 has ever been, as we believe, more generally practised at the West than 

 the East; and that we (with every body else, esteeming it highly) wrote, 

 so far as we know, one of the earliest articles upon it, descriptive and 

 commendatory, ever published at the East. Hort. vol. I., page 280. 



It will be argued that " a tree is a tree," and that root-grafts are "good 

 enough, any way;" that seedlings, like grafts, vary in hardihood or pro- 

 ductiveness ; that the hardy or productive ones, of either class, are equally 

 so, while the opposite, the one as well as the other, will go to the wall. 



Preeisely the argument when suckers were "just as good as any," 

 and of some plants they still seem to be ; and where, from time 

 immemorial, suckers or cuttings have answered all purposes, we would 

 not lightly call them in question. But for all that, discriminating culti- 

 vators cannot now be persuaded to trust many kinds of suckers as they 

 did once. Trees do unquestionably differ on account of different modes 

 of propagation ; thus, we have standards and dwarfs, seedlings and suck- 

 ers, root-grafts and top-grafts, unlike in many and important particulars. 

 Not, but that they may produce similar fruit, and under similar and favor- 

 able circumstances, be much alike throughout, still, there is a plain, prac- 

 tical distinction. So with the diflferent parts of a tree, the roots and tops 

 have utterly distinct functions, a root cannot become a branch, nor a 

 branch a proper root. Thus, a seedling varies from a sucker or cutting 

 in its root and collar, e5pecially and unquestionably throughout. Hence 

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