THE CANADIAN HORTICULTUPJST. 



varieties, the fruiting of which will greatly interest them, besides being 

 of great and permanent benefit to the country. 



As nearly all our best varieties of fruits have been chance seedlings, 

 ^\ itliout any artificial care from man, and as my own experience in 

 raising fine varieties has been so very simple and easy, and one which 

 any person with a small garden may follow, being more especially 

 suitable for ladies who delight generally in horticulture, and have more 

 leisure tlian men, I have been induced to give the results of my prac- 

 tice and experience, though I fear your readers will think me somewhat 

 egotistical before they finish this article. 



I have devoted very little time or trouble to raising new varieties, 

 and have never hybridized, but the results from what I have raised 

 have been very great, and had I been able to devote more time and 

 attention to it, they would, I think, have been truly wonderful. For 

 the encouragement of others who have fine fruit gardens and orchards, 

 I will recount these results. 



Sbedling Peaches. — The first seedling fruits I raised w^ere peaches. 

 Having all the finest varieties then known, I sowed the stones, and 

 plantgd tlie seedlings out in an orchard, budding them with the best 

 old varieties, but leaving one shoot from below the bud, to test the 

 quality of the seedling. Several of these wefe very fine, one more 

 especially, the "Eosebank," was and is one of the finest flavored 

 peaches. Another, a seedling from the old French peach, the Monstrous 

 Tompone, was the largest peach I ever saw — the third year that it bore 

 it had a couple of bushels of fruit on it, none of which were less than 

 thirteen inches in circumference, many eighteen inches. It was a 

 clingstone, as large as the Alexander apple, and when preserved whole 

 had a magnificent appearance. I have seen Heath's Late Cling, grown 

 at the south, nearly as large, but as grown in Canada, it was not 

 one-quarter the size of my seedling. What would the latter have been 

 if grown farther south, in a more genial clime for the peach ! Un- 

 fortunately I was not then in the nursery business, and the few trees 

 I propagated from it were killed, as was also the original tree, one 

 severe winter, that killed all the peach orchards. 



If the stones were taken from the best vai'ieties of peaches, where 

 none of inferior quality grew near, so that the pollen of the poor 

 varieties did not intermix, and these were cracked and planted where 

 they were permanently to grow, at the proper distance apart — or they 



