130 



VITALITY AND LONGEVITY IN FRUIT TREES. 



pies and pears have become short lived, and 

 excessively prone to disease. 



It is now but a few years since this same 

 process of mutilation was commenced with 

 the apple. Who ever heard of sun-blight 

 and premature death in the apple, so long 

 as the old modes of grafting into good 

 seedling roots were practiced ? But it is 

 already almost as common in these parts 

 m the apple as in the pear; and whole or- 

 chards, made from sprouts and pieces of 

 roots by this absurd mode of grafting, have 

 been swept off by premature disease and 

 death, while seedling trees of the same 

 age, and even trees grafted in the top, con- 

 tinue to thrive and grow vigorously. 



It is said by nurserymen that trees thus 

 made from pieces of root grow more clean, 

 and straight, and free from spurs and 

 sprouts. True — most true ; and that alone 

 is enough to condemn them ; for the eye of 

 the practiced physiologist sees in the tall, 

 straight, luxuriant, branchless, thornless 

 shoot, so made, the same marked indica- 

 tions of premature decay and death that 

 the physician sees in the tall, slim fair 

 favored, smooth skinned, scrofulous boy, 

 or in the pale faced, girded and corsetted 

 maiden. It may be beautiful ; but it is the 

 wrong sort of beauty for this rough, dying 

 world. At all events, our most intelligent 

 nurserymen are becoming fully awake to 

 the fact that trees so made, on this rich 

 soil, whether apple or pear, will not live 

 out half their days; and our farmers will 

 learn it to their sorrow within twenty years, 

 though many of them have found it out 

 already. Now I suppose this process of 

 deterioration does and will increase from 

 one generation of trees to another; and if 

 the same practice is continued as long with 

 our apples as it has been with our cherries 

 and pears, they will become equally preca- 

 rious and tender. 



I advert to this, however, as only the 

 predisposing and constitutional cause of the 

 disease in the apple, and especially in the 

 pear and cherry, and not as the immediate 

 or proximate cause. Just as tight lacing 

 and hard drinking are great predisposing 

 causes of many diseases in the human 

 frame, which would, perhaps, after all, 

 never be developed, unless developed by 

 some proximate cause in climate or diet. 



The proximate cause alone, without the 

 predisposing, may, and doubtless does, in 

 both cases, often produce the disease. But 

 it is only when both are united that its 

 ravages become general and frightful. 



Another predisposing cause is absurd 

 modes of pruning, even in the nursery, and 

 ever after. A tree is naturally a tree ; it 

 is not a shoot or sprout, a mere riding switch 

 or walking cane. Each branch above has 

 its own root below ; and whenever a branch 

 is cut, the corresponding root is proportion- 

 ally paralized, enfeebled or killed. Be- 

 sides, nature no more designed the trunk 

 of a tree to be exposed to the hot sun than 

 she did the body of a man ; and she every- 

 where guards this important point just in 

 proportion to the real danger. Hence, trees 

 that will form trunks sixty feet long in, the 

 shade, will not make them ten feet long in 

 the sun. Hence, too, all our forest trees, 

 whose branches are quite high up in New 

 England, and still higher in Nova Scotia, 

 around the burning prairies of Illinois throw 

 their branches quite down to the ground, 

 so as to screen themselves entirely from 

 the hot sun. I verily believe many of our 

 fruit cultivators in the west would kill all 

 the forest trees in the state, if they were 

 sent out with the pruning knife and hand- 

 saw to cultivale(?) them. For there are 

 few trees of any sort in the state that can 

 endure the scorching rays of our hot August 

 suns, thrown directly at full ler.gi.h upon 



