362 



CHARACTERISTICS OF FRUIT TREES. 



he will, we assure him from experience, 

 find himself very much puzzled. 



The most skilful judge of varieties that 

 we ever had the pleasure of knowing, was 

 that excellent pomolofjist, the late Mr. 

 Robert Manning of Salem, Mass. He 

 possessed the power of distinguishing, by a 

 mere glance of his eye, over the foliage 

 and growth, any given variety of pear tree, 

 with a rapidity and certainty which seemed 

 lo amount almost to intuition. Yet when 

 this gentleman first paid us a visit, some 

 eight or ten years ago, on going into our 

 grounds and attempting the exercise of this 

 his usual power, he frankly confessed to us 

 that such was the change produced by the 

 difference of our soil and climate as com- 

 pared with his own, that he could only re- 

 cognize at once, in his usual manner, the few 

 most strongly 7?tarkedvarieties. And we have 

 ourselves found the same results on exa- 

 mining trees in the nurseries about Boston. 



The only writer on fruits who has attempt- 

 ed to give a full description of all the points 

 of growth, foliage and habit, in fruit trees, 

 is DuHAMEL, whose work, in two large vo- 

 lumes, quarto, was published in Paris in 

 1768. We examined these points in Du- 

 hamel's " Arbres Fruitiers, " many times, 

 very carefully and patiently, with the varie- 

 ties described actually before us, and we 

 frankly confess that we were forced to the 

 conclusion, that the labored and minute de- 

 scriptions there given of leaf, bud, wood and 

 growth, conveyed so little distinct notion of 

 character, that they rather served to confound 

 than to aid the inquirer. We therefore aban- 

 doned the plan in our own work on fruits 

 as unsatisfactory, and only gave such points 

 in habit and growth as were strongly 

 marked and unmistakeable. 



At the same time we agree with Mr. 

 Phoenix in th€ belief that a great deal may 



be done to convey, in a description, such an 

 idea of certain points in growth, as will 

 assist a grower of some experience in 

 identifying many or most varieties merely 

 by the leaf, wood, and growth. The ex- 

 amples he gives are good ones and to the 

 point. But such descriptions must be made 

 by a person of nice observation, great ex- 

 perience, and must be based not upon arbi- 

 trary notions of size and shape, but upon 

 some standard laid down, and easily re- 

 ferred to. Thus, though the growth of a 

 tree varies much in different soils, the ser- 

 ratures of its leaves always remain nearly 

 the same — and the relative size of those 

 leaves are always either large or small. Yet 

 a pomological work, stating all these points, 

 should not be content with stating that the 

 leaves are coarsely or sharply serrated, 

 broad or narrow, without laying down an 

 exact standard of what a coarsely serra- 

 ted, and a hroad leaf, and their opposites 

 are, so that in so nice a point as this, there 

 shall be no room for doubt. Carefully pre- 

 pared engravings of standard forms will do 

 this perhaps — nothing else can. 



Now that our Fruits and Fruit Trees 

 has awakened so much zeal in the culture 

 of fruit in all parts of the country, we are 

 glad to notice the interest which even the 

 nicer points in Pomology, that are but little 

 attended to even in Europe, are awakening 

 among us. The desire for accuracy, which 

 great numbers of our cultivators now share 

 with our correspondent, is the best guaran- 

 tee that the subject will by and by receive 

 all the attention it so fully deserves. In the 

 mean time, we will assure him that it re- 

 quires no little labor and patience to obtain 

 the facts necessary to mark accurately even 

 a single new characteristic point in all the 

 varieties of a single fruit. We may per- 

 haps best give a correct idea of this by say- 



