STATE HORTICULTUKAL SOCIETY. 67 



found any gain in hardiness, or a preservation of the hardiness of 

 the parent, or will they be retrogrades? If hardiness is maintain- 

 ed or advanced, then let them grow and be used as seed-bearing 

 parents for crossing for quality and long keeping, or for top graft- 

 ing for early testing of new fruits, or for orchards on the top-work 

 plan, or to use the seeds to grow stocks for root grafting, 



Cions of the old seedling trees that are hardy where they stand 

 and which are bearing desirable fruits, and those of other newly dis- 

 covered and promising sorts, and we have a good many such, some 

 of them long keeping apples, should be also distributed, not alone 

 to experimental stations, but to members generally who will test 

 them and report. I mention nothing new in this ; but introduce 

 it for the purpose of impressing this fact, that we need to go after 

 these cions, cut and pack them ourselves, and get them to head- 

 quarters in an expert way, as, except in rare instances, the ownerg 

 of these trees are not successful in the handling of cions. An 

 effort was made last winter to distribute some of these cions by 

 correspondence only, and they mostly arrived dried up and dead. 

 Nurserymen are testing all the new sorts they can find, but on a 

 small scale ; commercially they are obliged by the necessities of 

 business to propagate the well-known sorts that have an establish- 

 ed leputation. Nearly all of our old seedling apple trees of appa- 

 rent value and the Russian sorts promise to make this their bear- 

 ing year; and this therefore is likely to be the golden opportunity 

 to search for new aquisitions in varieties and test the fruits. 



THE EXPERIMENTAL STATIONS. 



Little has been done with these during the year for want of any 

 system of collecting and distributing seeds and cions. 



RUSSIAN APPLES IN CARVER COUNTY. 



In my searches in August for fruit for the Philadelphia exhibit I 

 came across a small orchard of Russian apples on the farm of 

 Andrew Peterson, near Waconia, which I thought offered some 

 useful lessons in the study of Russian adaptation, and which ap- 

 peared tome to have a few varieties of considerate value, hitherto 

 unknown to us, being in tree iron-clad, hardy and blight proof, and 

 in fruit, large, handsome, productive and fairly good. In Novem- 

 ber I gathered up some cions of other sorts likely to be interesting 

 to Mr. Peterson, from my own grounds and contributions of Under- 



