412 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



that are not true to name. When a new variety is found to be of 

 value, a strong temptation is offered the nurseryman to put upon 

 the public spurious varieties that have no value and for which there 

 is no demand, giving them the name of the popular variety. There 

 are thousanSs of instances where the farmer has thus been imposed 

 upon, and after years of waiting has found that which has cost 

 money and valuable time is entirely worthless. If the tree or vine 

 lives to come into bearing, the fruit is in color, quality and size 

 next to worthless. 



There is no living thing of God's creation that will adapt itself 

 to all conditions of soil, location and environment. When experi- 

 ence pounds information into a man's understanding it may be safely 

 considered reliable, and when a nurseryman tells my neighbor that 

 of all spots on earth he has the ideal soil and all the conditions 

 necessary for successful orcharding, and then crosses the river to 

 my place, where everything is the exact reverse, and sings me the 

 same song. I don't stop to consider whether he is exposing his ig- 

 norance or trying to expose mine, but immediately, there and then, 

 lose faith in my fellow man. The world does move, and all these 

 things have come to pass within range of my recollection, and the 

 moral influences, to say the least, have not been wholesome. 



The editor of the "Farmers' Review" has had a prominent nur- 

 seryman and fruit grower in the sweatbox and elicited from him 

 some valuable information. He pleads extenuating circumstances 

 and prophesies a genuine reform in the near future. 



"The editor of the Review desires reasons why nurserymen 

 should propagate only from bearing trees of known fruiting alaility. 

 A careful study of a bud will show that the objection to propa- 

 gating through a long series of years from young and untested buds 

 from nursery rows is well founded. A bud contains the life germ 

 and a perfect embryo tree possessing the same vascular system of 

 the tree or plant upon which it grows, and before modern investiga- 

 tion proved the contrary it was thought no variation ever took 

 place. But we know that a tree changes its organism and becomes 

 weak in some parts and strong in other parts, and that when these 

 changes are effected they are as permanent as any of its charac- 

 teristics. 



"When a tree becomes unfruitful, its fruit producing or seed 

 organism is weak in its buds, and the tree growing out of these 

 buds will possess these weaknesses, as repeated experiments have 

 shown. Take buds from a well-developed and very fruitful tree and 

 another from the nursery row, where it has been propagated through 

 a dozen or more years from the young non-bearing wood. In the 

 first case you will see a marked difference in the wood growth. 

 The tree will not look so smooth and straight as the other, but under 

 good treatment it will come into bearing much earlier and be much 



