382 State Horticultural Society. 



planted into orchards. Through this method millions of trees have been 

 grown and planted over a vast scope of country, and millions in this day 

 are being planted into the large commercial orchards of Missouri and 

 other state. There are some advantages in propagating apple trees by 

 budding, especially when scions are scarce of some new and valuable 

 variety; but the fact that root-grafting can be done when little else can 

 be done in the nursery, makes it extremely doubtful that nurserymen 

 will find it to their advantage to propagate apple trees by budding, and 

 still more there is no evidence that budded trees are superior to well 

 grown root-grafted trees. 



Unscrupulous nurserymen, and the tree agents, are constantly try- 

 ing to invent schemes to deceive people and thereby get a larger price 

 for trees. Several years ago a bud scheme was worked by taking ad- 

 vantage of unusually cold weather, which damaged the heart of the 

 bodies and limbs of trees. The claim was made by agents that the dead 

 heart of bodies and limbs came through propagating by root grafting. 

 They said where the splice was made the union was imperfect and de- 

 cay set in which eventually caused the entire tree to become diseased and 

 worthless. The agents further claimed that budded trees were entirely 

 exempt from black heart, but as it costs a great deal more to propagate 

 apple trees by budding, the price necessarily would be much more. So 

 the people bought the so-called budded trees at forty and fifty cents a 

 tree, which, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, were only root-grafted 

 trees cut back to the crown when one year old. 



Following the budded tree scheme came the whole-root theory. It 

 was claimed that a scion grafted to a whole root caused the tree to have 

 a deeper root system ; -that the union was more perfect when the scion 

 was grafted above the yellow root in the crovv-n ; that the tree would make 

 a more vigorous growth, bear better and live longer. Furthermore it 

 was claimed that a scion grafted to the yellow part of the seedling did 

 not make a perfect union ; that the roots of the tree grown from such 

 a graft were mainly surface roots and were more easily affected by cold, 

 heat and dry weather, consequently were not so productive and were short 

 lived. 



I am aware that this whole-root story is believed by a few people, 

 and is used extensively by tree agents, at the same time I will venture the 

 assertion that there is not a single nursery in the United States that 

 grafts scions to first-class seedlings and plants the entire root. Some of 

 the nurseries may graft scions in the crown and make the root four or 

 five inches long, but grafting a scion to an apple root twelve or fifteen 

 inches long and planting that length of root in the nursery is all bosh. 



