THE OWATONNA TREE STATION. 433 



likely to do better service for his state than he could if he had spent 

 all of his efforts in originating'. He has, as before said, carried on 

 the work with great thoroughness and on an extensive scale, hav- 

 ing several thousand seedlings and varieties under trial. 



Personally, I believe that I have learned how to get valuable 

 results for two or three years from surplus trees in a too thickly 

 planted orchard by 'girdling" and "feeding" and compelling them 

 to give down fruit before they must be chopped out. And 1 have no 

 doubt that hundreds of orchardists will receive benefits and draw 

 valuable lessons from Mr. Dartt's experiments. 



PLUMS. 



J. S. HARRIS, LA CRESCENT. 



(Southern Minnesota Horticultural Society.) 



Until within a very few years, writers on American pomology 

 have paid but little attention to the plum except varieties of Euro- 

 pean origin (Prunus domestics) and their American descendents. 

 This one species had seemed to satisfy the wants of the country 

 until it was found that there was a vast region of country west of 

 Lake Michigan and north of central Illinois and Iowa where they 

 could not be successfully grown, and there, after repeated trials 

 and failures for a long time, the native wild plum (Prunus Ameri. 

 cana) was so abundant that little or no attention was paid to cul- 

 tivating or improving a fruit that was so easily secured. Later the 

 impression began to prevail that its nature was so wild that, like the 

 Indian and buffalo, it could not stand up before civilization. This 

 impression arose from the fact that the crops in the groves and 

 thickets were becoming more frequently a failure, and the size and 

 quality of the fruit generally inferior to what it had been in earlier 

 years, and trees from the groves taken up and planted near the 

 homes seldom fruited as regular or produced as fine fruit as in their 

 native surroundings. Men were slow to learn that the fault was not 

 so much in the plum as in the so-called civilization. When nature 

 attended the groves, the soil was kept moist, rich and loose by mulch- 

 ing of leaves and decaying of vegetable matter; when brought 

 under the care of civilization, barbarizing influences surrounded 

 them. Domestic animals trampled the ground in the groves until it 

 could no longer absorb the water from rains and melting snows, 

 and browsed and fed upon the foliage and new growth, so that the 

 trees lost their strength and ability to bring a crop of fruit oftener 

 than semioccasionally, and that dwarfed and pinched by starva- 

 tion. With rare exceptions, trees removed from the thickets to the 

 dooryard or gardens fared no better. They were either continually 

 trampled about and the soil kept like the beaten highway, or stood 

 in sod that was impervious to air and water, were often browsed 

 and run over by the farm animals, and never hoed, cultivated, 

 mulched or manured. 



There is something fascinating about the growing of plums, and 

 notwithstanding the almost certainty that the domestic species can- 

 not be successfully grown here, considerable quantities of the trees 



