AUGUST. 227 



]\Ir. Bailey (who I believe to be one of our very best gardeners) in a 

 very excellent article in the April number of the Florist, says, " It is 

 much to be recrretted that the zealous enthusiasm of some well-meaninor 

 individuals does occasionally lead them into error, and we have recently 

 had instances of this in the marvellous recommendations of M. de Jongrhe 

 and his followers, who have said that by properly thinning the spurs 

 and blossom buds of our fruit trees we can give them a greater degree of 

 constitutional vigour, and by some special act of hocus pocus enable their 

 tender blossoms to resist severe frost with certainty." Again : " Gentle 

 reader, let us pause for a moment and enquire what is the effect of 

 frost upon tender vegetation, and try to discover, if we can, in what 

 way the operation of pruning, simple or profoundly philosophical, can 

 tend to lessen the mechanical force exerted by the expansion of fluids 

 in the process of congelation, or arrest the chemical decomposition 

 which ensues after such injury. It will, I presume, be on all hands 

 admitted that plants suffer injury from frost in proportion to the 

 quantity of Huid they contain, and that in the process of freezing the 

 sap vessels are ruptured by the progressive expansion which takes 

 place in the formation of ice, and that once ruptured the future circulation 

 is arrested, and death and decay follow." 



If, believing that the system which ]\I. de Jonghe advocates is sound 

 in theory and practice, and that the system (namely, of letting our 

 orchards go unpruned and uncared for) which he condemns as wTong 

 constitutes a fillowerof M. de Jonghe, then 1 am one, and as a follower 

 I beg to be allowed to attempt a brief reply to j\Ir. Bailey, but before 

 doing so I wish to make a short extract from the Gardeners' Chronicle 

 of the 12th May. 



The editor, in commentirg on the long and excellent report upon the 

 effect of the last winter upon the vegetation near Dublin, after admitting 

 that the old doctrine — that the action of frost is purely mechanical — 

 was to some extent true, proceeds to point out some plants which are 

 tender and killed by a few degrees of frost, whilst others exceedingly 

 like them are hardy and will stand any degree of cold. He then says, 

 " All the experience that 40 years* acquaintance with such phenomena 

 has given us leads to one, and only one, conclusion, which is, that the 

 power of resisting frost is the consequence of specific vitality, and of 

 nothing else." 



Now, if I understand M. de Jonghe rightly, his argument is this, — 

 that a tree, or a whole orchard, which has been properly pruned, and 

 which has been for years regularly attended to in thinning of the spurs, 

 &c., and which has never been left to bear too large a crop of fruit, will 

 be better able to stand our unfavourable springs than a tree or orchard 

 which has never been pruned nor attended to — the case of most of our 

 orchards. In this I cannot perceive any error. Surely a regiment of 

 soldiers of sound, strong, healthy constitutions would pass through the 

 rigours of a Crimean winter with fewer losses than a regiment of 

 soldiers whose constitutions, through neglect and want of care, are weak 

 and unhealthy. And does not the same elementary constituents enter 

 into the formation of the flesh and blood of one regiment as of the other ? 

 Now M. de Jonghe does not say that the dehcate organs of fructification 



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