172 HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY OF NEW YORK. 



At all our horticultural fairs and meetings we talk incessantly of 

 varieties without regard to plant individuality. We never put stress on 

 the physical condition of plants under test but class them all on an 

 equality. New varieties come and shine like a meteor in the horticultural 

 heavens for a season, and then through a want of restriction and selection 

 of better variations, they produce fewer berries of lower quality, and finally 

 drop out of sight while the new seedlings follow in rapid succession. 



In the not distant future our agricultural colleges will give us experts 

 who will detect these valuable variations, and our nurseries will furnish us 

 plants and trees handed down through generations as the accumulations 

 of better qualities through constant selection of bud variation just as they 

 are now doing in breeding corn, cotton and wheat. We must no longer 

 breed our plants at random, but do it with a definite object in view. 



Let us have hybridization to secure initial changes and then, with the 

 mind centered on the ideal, seek the slower process of bud variation as a 

 means of developing and fixing in the plant the desired changes, and then 

 we shall see the dawn of a new era in horticulture. 



H. F. Roberts: Have you made any crosses on any of these improved bud varia- 

 tions? 



R. M. Kellogg: No, sir; I have felt that this is an age of specialties. I used to 

 dabble in almost everything, but the last three years I have found all my time fully 

 occupied in this one point. Take the popular varieties to-day handled by nurserymen, and 

 you will find that they all center on less than twelve varieties that are leading popular 

 sorts. This has arisen out of the fact that we cannot get a superior variety on an average 

 of less than 20,000 seedlings, and it is true that these are required to be developed by a 

 system of thorough tillage through many years, and that is the cause of the plants run- 

 ning out. Strawberry growers never prune their plants. They never restrict them. They 

 bear all the pollen they can, and seed bearing takes place, and it runs the plant out so it 

 is physically unable to produce seed, and as the fruit flesh grows only as the suDstance for 

 the seeds to grow in, you soon run them out. Now, this has been my work: Simply 

 building up in the plant the seed organism and consequent fruit development, and, there- 

 fore, I have not paid any attention to new selections, but have taken those produced or 

 found by other people and stimulated them by thorough tillage, plenty of air and vinder 

 the most favorable conditions, using largely phosphates and potash — as you know, those 

 stimulate the seed-bearing organism — and bring out the plants in that way. The state- 

 ment has been made, I don't vouch for that, that ninety millions of dollars are spent 

 every year in strawberries, and yet I believe that one-half of that crop is lost, simply 

 because of plants that by devitalization have been simply rendered incapable of bearing 

 fruit. You prune vour orchards; you prune everything else; why shouldn't you prune 

 your strawberries? 



