278 ILLINOIS STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



it must begin the young roots before it can feed from earth or air to any 

 great extent. But to make those leaves, and to make these rootlets, and 

 above all to make flowers, the trees must have stored away a large food 

 supply. From the time when growth ceases in summer till the season is 

 ended, the whole work of the plant is to prepare itself for winter and for 

 a good start in the spring, and if circumstances are favorable, for the 

 office of reproduction. Of course, those who have been observing have 

 seen that growth in all directions does not cease simultaneously. First 

 the limit of length is reached ; next the diameter finishes its increase ; 

 and herbaceous tissues are changed to woody tissues, and it is probable 

 that the last act of growth in the fall is the perfection of the internal 

 structure of the bud. But as important as is present growth, the pro- 

 vision for wintering and future growth is equally important, and if the 

 plant is prevented from making that provision by any circumstances of 

 privation, it may suffer. The tree with cells empty or partly empty of 

 starch and other necessary plant food to organize into leaves in spring, 

 cannot do well even if a most favorable winter allows it to live over, but 

 if the poor starveling must battle with the dry northwest winds which are 

 hungry for its life juices, and with the cold which collapses its poorly 

 filled cells, what wonder that it dies. 



Now in the light of these principles we can see why the cold and 

 changeable winter that followed the excessively dry autumn of 1872, 

 might easily give us a crop of dead and dying trees in the spring of 1873. 

 Suppose that the trees grew during the growing season of 1872; when the 

 time came that plant food for the young leaves and young roots of next 

 spring was to be organized and stored away, there was such a lack of 

 moisture about the roots that they could not supply the tree with the 

 requisite quantity. Not enough food or not the right quality could be 

 stored. The tree could not make hydro-carbonaceous bodies without 

 hydrogen, any more than the Egyptian slaves could make the brick with- 

 out straw; and that beautiful autumn of 1872, without mud, without mois- 

 ture in the soil for several feet in depth, gave the poor trees no chance to 

 lay up their treasures for the beginning of the new life next year. A 

 little more water in the fall would have given the tree a chance to go into 

 winter with its exhaustive evaporation and its severe cold, like a strong 

 man goes forth to battle armed at every point and filled Avith courage. 



I saw a row of peech trees, at Champaign, which ran from high into 

 low, rather peaty soil. The high part had done best prior to 1872 ; since 

 that the low part has done the best. Before 1872, there was an occa- 

 sional killing of limbs upon the peaty soil, and the general health of the 

 trees seemed to be suffering, but last winter killed the trees on the high 

 land which had not been before injured, and the trees in the bottom lived 

 over winter, bloomed, grew well, and bore some fruit. Those trees, be- 

 fore furnished with an excess of moisture, had not too much in the fall of 

 1872, and yet they had enough to enable them to ripen up their wood for 

 the hard coming winter. I have listened to many reports that trees 

 ripened up their wood well in the fall of 1872 ; but I fear the term ripened 

 is not well used in sucli cases. If it is meant that they ceased to grow 



