352 State Horticultural Society, 



more luscious vegetables, our even more delicious fruits. Contem- 

 plate, for instance, the marvels that ripen nowadays in the mean- 

 est gardens, among the lowest branches, wisely subdued by the 

 patient and generous espaliers. Less than a century ago they 

 were unknown; and we owe them to the trifling and innumerable 

 exertions of a legion of small seekers, all more or less narrow, all 

 more or less ridiculous. 



It is thus man requires nearly all his riches. There is nothing 

 puerile in nature, and he who becomes impassioned of a flower, 

 a blade of grass, a butterfly's wing, a nest, a shell, wraps his 

 passion around a small thing that always contains a great truth. 

 To succeed in modifying the appearance of a flower is insignifi- 

 cant in itself, if you will; but reflect upon it for however short a 

 while and it becomes gigantic. — Old Fashioned Flowers, Maeter- 

 linck. 



ORCHARDS MUST HAVE CARE. 



It is apparently an easy matter for the promotor to make a 

 northern man believe that all he has to do to get on the high- 

 road to wealth is to buy some cheap southern land, have it planted 

 to fruit trees and await returns. The south holds great possibili- 

 ties for the industrious citizen either in the growing of fruit or in 

 general agriculture, but there, as elsewhere, no business will thrive 

 unless attended to. 



In traveling through the fruit regions of Southern Missouri 

 we have observed orchards that had been so left without atten- 

 tion. The timber had been cut ofi" and the trees set and left, not 

 only without cultivation but without the stumps and roots of the 

 timber being killed and removed. The result was that the fruit 

 trees, such as had survived, were hard to find among the profusion 

 of sprouts from the stumps and roots of the former forest, and 

 were of no value when found. 



There is, indeed, much less chance for an orchard to take 

 care of itself in the south than in the prairie regions farther north. 

 In the latter the fruit trees have but the grass and weeds, in the 

 shape of vegetation, to contend with, and will soon overtop and 

 shadow them, gradually gaining the mastery. But on newly cut 

 timber lands of the south the young newly planted fruit trees are 

 no match for the vigorous saplings that spring from the old es- 

 tablished .root systems of the former forest giants. 



