366 ANNUAL REPORT. 



have all proven perfectly hardy here, have made a good, thrifty 

 growth, and are now in bearing. Our late plantings of the hy- 

 brids have been largely Whitney's No. 20, and this leads them 

 all in our judgment; and not in our judgment alone, as the Amer- 

 ican Pomological Society has pronounced it the best cooking and 

 canning apple in the United States; and allow me to predict 

 that in the not distant future the West will lead the East in the 

 superiority of her fruits. Within the last week Iowa has won 

 the two hundred dollar prize at the New Orleans exhibition, of- 

 fered for the best display of apples, and I have already men- 

 tioned Minnesota carrying off the national honors the previous 

 year. These straws would indicate that the West leads even 

 now. We must concede the East, however, a greater number of 

 good varieties than we can boa^t. But they had all the advan- 

 tage of the system in vogue a half century ago of planting the 

 orchard from seed, and each tree was a distinct variety. In this 

 way they originated their Baldwin, Spitzenberg, Bellflower, etc. 

 Later came top grafting, to perpetuate these desirable kinds. 

 But usually there were plenty of branches of the original tree 

 left to bear fruit and test its worth or worthlessness. The old 

 home orchard in Michigan, to which my memory lovingly re- 

 verts, was started fifty years ago in a corner which is still called 

 the nursery, some gnarled and knotty siDecimens of the orig- 

 inal planting still remaining; and I wish some of our advocates 

 of close planting could see their futile efforts to reach the sun- 

 shine, and the solitary apple that sometimes hangs on some top- 

 most branch. When the trees were large enough to transplant, 

 the best of them were reset in the orchard thirty-two feet apart. 

 When my people came into possession of the orchard twenty 

 years later, every tree was a seedling — a distinct variety by 

 itself; and even now the most of them have branches that have 

 escaped the grafter's knife, and bear fruit from the original stock. 

 Under this system a great variety of good sorts was inevitable; 

 but the universal custom now prevailing of root grafting, has 

 changed all this. We take no chances, but we get no new vari- 

 eties. But our horticultural pioneers know no such word as fail, 

 and have risen to the emergency. It is of great interest to us 

 all to know that apples are being scientifically propagated by 

 the pollenizing of blossoms with a view to combining the desir- 

 able qualities of the parent trees in the seedlings raised from 

 seed so fertilized. This process, of course, involves years of 

 more or less patient waiting, but it has already produced fruits 



