FRUITS AND FLOWERS. 275 



of being luxuries accessible only to the few, will be produced 

 in such quantities, and furnished at such rates, as to place them 

 witliin tlie reach of the whole community as articles of common 

 use. A glance at the nursery business affords additional evi- 

 dence of the same thing. It has been estimated, by one well 

 qualified to judge, that the sales of trees throughout our Union 

 amount in value to upwards of a million dollars annually, and 

 the amount increases witli every season. Nurseries have been 

 drained of every thing worth cultivation, and very much of 

 that which was worthless. So great, indeed, has been and still 

 is the mania for tree planting, that well-informed persons have 

 expressed fears that the whole matter of raising fruit, with the 

 view of profit, would be "run into the ground." That fruit 

 would become so common that the market would be glutted, 

 and that as a speculation in the hands of the producer it would 

 prove an entire failure. 



Let us consider for a moment how the case stands at the 

 present time. Are we really in danger of becoming surfeited 

 with an overabundance of good fruit ? Has our experience 

 during the past few years been such as to justify this conclu- 

 sion ? We think not. So far from the market being oversup- 

 plied, there are very many people who have never even tasted 

 some of our finest varieties of fruits. They are not yet pro- 

 duced in sufficient quantities to get into the markets at all. 

 This is true of even our staple fruit, the apple. When we think 

 for a moment that the Baldwin, an apple of which there is 

 probably nearly as many raised in this region as of all other 

 marketable apples together, never wants for purchasers in the 

 years of its greatest abundance; that it always commands very 

 high prices in the spring, in common with all late-keeping 

 apples, and that the constantly increasing demand for many 

 kinds of winter apples, more especially sweet apples for ship- 

 ping, is one which will for a long time prevent the price of such 

 fruit from reaching a point below which it would cease to be 

 remimerative, it certainly does not appear that the orchardist 

 need to entertain fears that he is wasting his time or money in 

 planting and cultivating such trees. Then, again, to glance at 

 the pear, a fruit raised with much more difficulty than the 

 apple, it is true, and correspondingly more valuable. With the 

 exception of some few of the inferior varieties, this fruit is 



