THE REGENERATION OF FRUITS. 29:i 



piece of slate or tile is then placed on the pot, so as to completely 

 cover it, and prevent the ingress of mice.* A few days after this 

 I may be again eating a Louise Bonne Pear. I reserve the 

 pips, remove the covering from the pot, and plant them with the 

 others, and so repeat this till some fifteen pips are planted in 

 one pot, which will raise quite enough trees from one variety. 

 Again, it is February ; 1 am at my dessert ; a delicious Josephine 

 de Malines Pear gives me some fine pips ; my pots of earth are 

 frozen ; I place them in paper, and write the name on it. I 

 then have a pot of eartli taken to the greenhouse, or, in default 

 of such a structure, to the kitchen, plant the pips as above, 

 write on the label "Josephine de Malines Pear, Feb., 1855," 

 cover the pot as before directed, and place it out of doors ; early 

 in March the covers must be taken off : the young plants from 

 the pips sown in the autumn will make their appearance early in 

 March if the weather be mild ; those from pips sown in February 

 or March will not vegetate till April or May, and the pips sown 

 in May will probably remain dormant till the following March. 

 There are two methods of managing young Pear seedlings ; the 

 first is the most simple, and well adapted for those whose hands 

 are full of gardening matters ; it is merely to let the pots stand 

 on the bricks in full sunshine all the summer, giving them 

 abundance of water; each young tree in the autumn will, or 

 ought to be, from twelve to eighteen inches in height, and its 

 stem as thick as a quill, and well ripened ; about the end of 

 October, these seedlings may be planted out in the garden, in 

 rows, three feet row from row, and eighteen inches apart in the 

 rows ; and in March following, if there is a wish to bring them 

 rapidly into bearing, each young seedling tree may be cut down 

 to within two inches of its base, and one or two scions made 

 from it (one ought to be enough, and that made from the lower 

 part of the shoot) ; these should be grafted on to some stout 

 stocks, or on to branches of a bearing tree : an excellent method 

 is to buy at a nursery old dwarf Pears without names at a cheap 

 rate, to plant them out one year, and then to rind-graft them 

 (this is to insert the grafts between the bark and the wood) with 

 the seedlings. They should be headed down to a stump, nine or 

 ten inches in height in February. In April the bark will part 



* The most eligible of all covers for seeds that i-emain some time in 

 the ground, is the perforated plate of which I send a specimen. I 

 have used these about fifteen years, having then been driven into 

 inventing them, from the ravages of mice and birds. 



