PROGRESS IN HORTICULTURE. 451 



PROGRESS IN HORTICULTURE. 



J. S. HARRIS, LA CRESCENT, 



We are happily living in the most progressive age the world has 

 ever known since the beginning of time. The nineteenth century, 

 even the last half of the century, has been the harvest of the ages in 

 wonderful discoveries and inventions that to us appear to have a 

 direct bearing upon the weal of the human race. It has witnessed 

 greater advances in the arts, sciences and inventions, and greater 

 progress in agriculture, horticulture and all those things that lead 

 to refinement, higher civilization, greater comfort and truer life, 

 than any previous one thousand years since the beginning of histor- 

 cal records. In no country upon the earth has the progress been 

 greater than in our own, these United States of America, and in no 

 one of these states has it been more marked than in our Minnesota. 



My memory of horticulture covers a period of nearly seventy 

 years. It began in the early years of the settlement of northern 

 Ohio, and I have been an active and working votary of it down all 

 the years since. My first love was the apple, the pioneer fruit and 

 the first fruit that the hardy pioneers of the wilderness of the then 

 far west attempted to cultivate, and, doubtless, I received inspira- 

 tion from oft hearing the story of "Johnny Appleseed," who, with his 

 mush pot and bag of apple seeds, made an annual tour through the 

 gloomy regions of the farther west, dropping fruit germs in the 

 forest, that grew and produced pippins for the vanguard of the fore- 

 most pioneers of Ohio's hills, valleys and plains. In those early 

 years I had never seen, tasted or scarcely heard of a garden straw- 

 berry. No one dreamed of cultivating the brambles, or American 

 species of raspberries and blackberries. The tomato, which today 

 is a valuable article of commerce and considered an almost in- 

 despensible article of food, and of which millions of bushels are 

 annually grown for canning purposes alone, was scarcely ever cul- 

 tivated except as an ornamental plant and was by the masses of the 

 people believed to be a dangerous and poisonous plant. The plums, 

 pears and peaches numbered but a few and comparatively poor va- 

 rieties, and of grapes we had only the native wildlings and the 

 Isabella and Catawaba and a little later the sour Clinton, and these 

 were culti,vated by but few people and in a very small way. 



The method of propagating trees by root-grafting was but little 

 known, and previous to about sixty years ago the nurseries of Amer- 

 ica were chiefly seedlings, or seedling trees, budded or grafted above 

 the ground. According to my recollection, I made my first root- 

 grafts and put them in nursery in about 18iO, using about six inches 

 of root and three bud scions. The common price of a" budded or 

 grafted apple tree was twenty-five cents, and that compared with the 

 cost of money at that time would be equal to fifty cents at the pres- 

 ent time; while the cost of raising the trees was much greater than 

 at the present time. 



The great majority of the orchards were planted with natural 

 seedlings, and after they began to bear fruit such as produced good 

 or desirable fruit were retained and those that produced worthless 



