226 FRUIT CYLINDERS. 



straw ropes, spruce fir-branches, and the like. The Lancashire 

 gooseberry-fancier has been known to share even his bed-clothuS 

 with the gooseberry bush on a frosty night, rather than permit 

 his "Roaring Lion " to suffer. 



In nurseries the compartments are chequered with evergreen 

 hedges, or, failing that, with Beech, whose leaves remain on the 

 plant so long as to have earned for this tree the adage " that it 

 keeps its old coat until it sees how the new one suits." 



The growers of those splendid specimens of Cape Heaths &c, 

 which we see at exhibitions, use a tent of bunting to lessen the 

 sun's glare and the force of storms, in order to preserve the 

 blossoms and the foliage in the finest possible condition. 



The normal form of a standard fruit-tree is either globular or 

 mushroom-shaped, and therefore it faces every point of the 

 compass, and bears fruit all over it, having an aspect East, West, 

 North, and South. Now, although one tree injures another by its 

 shade and other robberies, still it is clear that the individual tree 

 benefits as much by its foliage on the shady or northern side, as 

 it does by that on its sunny or southern exposure, and in practice 

 we find the foliage of fruit-trees, and that of many flowering- 

 plants, as Camellias for instance, on a north wall unusually fine. 



The distance of one fruit-tree from another on an ordinary 

 garden wall, I may take to be 15 feet ; I have therefore made the 

 circumference of the fruit cylinders here introduced, 15 feet, and 

 the height 5 feet. 



The ease with which all tangents may be made to run into the 

 circumferential line peculiarly adapts the circular form to this 

 sort of work, and the ease too with which a shoot fruitful at the 

 extremities may be made to return upon the barren end of itself, 

 and thereby clothe the bole, is no small recommendation to this 

 style of trellis, not to mention its unity of character, and conse- 

 quent strength, having no ends, being a broad-based cylinder or 

 low column. In explanation of this, the straight lines from the 

 hole of a tree easily run into the circular form as in ground plan, 

 Fig. la, and the barren part, at the bole end of the shoot, is by 

 the circular trellis covered by the fruitful part, so that without 

 any doubling back, the whole is covered with foliage and fruit ; 

 for everybody knows that fruits are scanty near the bole end of 

 the branch and fruitful at the tips generally. 



To show the practical value of small cylinders as compared 

 with large ones, let us take one with a circumference of 30 feet 

 instead of 15, and in round numbers try it thus : — 



