THE FLORAL WORLD AND GARDEN GUIDE. 237 



It is scarcely possible to carry out a scientific cultural system with 

 standard trees of any kind. They approximate to the characters of 

 forest trees, and need nearly the same treatment ; in fact, the best 

 general rule for pruning them is admitted to be-—" leave them alone !" 

 "Wherever good fruits and large supplies are in request, the bush 

 and pyramid forms must be adopted for this simple reason, that they 

 are completely under our control. To plant them and leave them to 

 grow wild will be an absurd proceeding. The ground must be enriched ; 

 they must be periodically lifted ; the young growth must be pinched in 

 May and June ; the crops must be thinned ; and sometimes there must 

 be strips of netting or canvas hung between the rows to mitigate the 

 effects of freezing winds. Fruit trees under such a system of manage- 

 ment suffer less from frosts than neglected trees ; because the lifting, 

 the pinching, the pruning, and the forking of the ground between 

 them, combine to delay slightly their period of blooming, and they 

 oftentimes escape injury when the bloom of large old trees is com- 

 pletely destroyed by east winds in March and April. Moreover, trees 

 of moderate dimensions can be actually covered for protective purposes 

 at a small expense, but no one ever yet attempted to cover standard 

 apple and pear trees forty feet high, and thirty feet or more across ; it 

 would need the dome of St. Paul's as a nightcap for each one of them. 

 It is very certain that nearness to the ground is favourable to the pro- 

 ductiveness of dwarf trees in many ways. During winter the frost is 

 more severe near the ground than at te:?, fifteen, or twenty feet 

 removed from it. The consequence is that bush trees are more fre- 

 quently and more severely frozen than trees of considerable altitude, 

 and they therefore rest more perfectly and are in less haste to start into 

 growth in spring. Then the tree that lifts its head high towards the 

 heavens catches the earliest rays of the sun in early spring, when 

 bushes 'close by are still in shadow. The growth of the tree corre- 

 sponds in precocity, and we see the great old apple and pear trees in 

 bloom long before the bushes begin to show colour. Such at all events 

 is tho experience of the writer of this, and no doubt he will be con- 

 firmed by the observations of others. Lastly, the tree has a lower 

 mean temperature during the summer months than the bush. There is 

 oftentimes a playful breeze moving in the topmost branches when there 

 is none near the ground, and high up in mid air there will always bean 

 active radiation of heat away from the tree, but near the ground there 

 will be radiation and reflection of heat to the bush. It is not surprising, 

 therefore, that small trees and bushes and low espaliers should give a 

 better average of production than large trees, and that if we want 

 really fine fruit we must not trust to standards for it. 



The foregoing remarks apply directly to the case of peaches, nec- 

 tarines, and apricots when grown in open quarters. Those who intend 

 to succeed will plant bushes ; that is to say, they will secure plants 

 grafted close to the collar, or with only one to two feet of stem ; but 

 those who intend to fail will make sure of standards. Since the pub- 

 lication of the remarks on this subject in our last, we have heard much 

 about the production of these fruits in open quarters during the past 

 season, and it is beginning to be evident that many enterprising men 

 are looking forward to some very substantial results from this depart- 



