16 



LONDON HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY'S GARDEN, 



grapes, which, so far, gives him great sa- 

 tisfaction. He commences at the top of 

 the wall or house, and works down to the 

 bottom, stopping [pinching the ends off. 

 Ed.] all redundant growth early in June. 

 About ten days afterwards, he begins at 

 at the top and prunes and dresses as usual, 

 laying-in (unless spurred) his next year's 

 wood. Formerly his men began at the 

 bottom of the tree or wall, and pruned as 

 high as they could reach, — going in this 

 way round a wall of two or three acres. 

 Then they took a ladder, and beginning 

 directly above where they commenced be- 

 fore, they dressed the remainder or upper 

 part of the wall. The result was, that 

 during the interval of the top and bottom 

 dressings, the sap, diverted from the lower 

 part of the tree, was thrown (in addition to 

 its natural tendency in that direction,) into 

 the upper, untrimmed portion of the tree, 

 causing great elaboration there, and a cor- 

 responding torpor in the reduced and pruned 

 portion below. The result was, that the 

 lower part of the tree became barren ; 

 whereas, by the present system of pruning, 

 the top being trimmed first, the extra sap 

 is forced into the lower branches ; and 

 hence these lower branches, even within six 

 inches of the ground, are covered with 

 fruit, bearing, perhaps, even more than the 

 upper limbs. 



Mr. Thompson informed me that Wil- 

 mot, and the other market growers of the 

 grape, make all their bunches of the pound 

 size* in preference to a larger size. They 

 do not thin out the berries so much, but 

 they cut off the points of the bunch, making 

 the cluster resemble (if I have not forgotten 

 my mathematics,) an oblate spheroid. 



Keen's Seedling strawberry still holds its 

 place in Mr. Thompson's estimation, as 



* Most persons preferring to buy half a dozen bunches of 

 a pound each, to one large bunch of six pounds. 



the best strawberry for cultivation here/ 

 though many prefer Myatt's British Queen. 



In a conversation which I had with Mr, 

 Thompson, on the diseases of fruit trees,, 

 he told me that he had never seen any- 

 thing like our fire-blight or frozen-sap- 

 blight in the pear; nor can he conjecture 

 the cause of the former. The latter, con- 

 sidering our gieat changes of temperature, 

 he thought more intelligible ; and he thinks 

 a remedy,, that I desired my gardener to 

 try a year ago, might be efficacious, viz., 

 strawing up the stem and principal branch- 

 es, and more especially those exposed to- 

 the rays of the sun in winter. 



Our great peach enemies, the yellows- 

 and peach worm, are alike unknown here \ 

 he has seen one instance only of a disease 

 in the peach tree, resembling in its charac- 

 ter the yellows. It was an American tree, 

 I think a George 4th, which was budded 

 on a peacii bottom, and trained against a 

 south wall. It ripened its fruit prema- 

 turely, pushed out the clusters of small, 

 narrow leaves, became quite yellow in foli- 

 age, and finally died. He attributed it to 

 the fact of its being worked on a peach, 

 instead of a plum bottom, as all the other 

 trees in the Horticultural Society's garden 

 are ; and he suggested that we should 

 always bud our peaches on plum stocks, 

 I think, however, the disease he referred 

 to was probably imported in the tree from 

 America. If so, it does not seem to have 

 communicated the yellows to any of the 

 English trees,* 



The Horticultural Society is paying con- 

 siderable attention, just now, to their ar- 

 boretum. A few of the trees that struck 

 me were the Dovarton yew, a rather up- 



* We are every day more convinced that the yellows is 

 nothing more than a constitutional languor, brought about, 

 as we have before suggested, by poor soil and bad culture 

 for several generation*. It has nearly disappeared in our 

 neighborhood, where there are nowtreesl6 or 18 year? old, 

 bearing, every year, very fine crops of delicious fruit. Ed. 



