SPECIAL PRACTICES 167 



13. All means of obstructing the movement of 

 sap as notching, shredding, bending, twist- 

 ing, girdling are matters of special and 

 local application, and are to be associated 

 more with modes of training than with prun- 

 ing proper. 



This principle is the complement of Section 12. 

 If the habitual performance of the plant in- 

 duced by consecutive rational treatment deter- 

 mines its usefulness, then the treatment of indi- 

 vidual buds and spurs must be merely incidental 

 and special matters. The fact is, that all the 

 advice in respect to notching, bending, and the 

 like, is born of the amateur and garden - culture 

 fruit-growing of the Old World. Whether the 

 authors were conscious of the fact or not, our 

 older American pomological writings are direct 

 offshoots of European small -area practices. The 

 emphasis is placed first on varieties, and always 

 on facts rather than on principles. In vegetable 

 gardening literature the same has been emphati- 

 cally true, and it was not until Henderson wrote 

 his "Gardening for Profit" that the large -area and 

 commercial American gardening found its tongue; 

 but even Henderson followed the detached and 

 cyclopedic method of arrangement, which is born 

 of a desire for facts and ready -reference rather 

 than for great truths and principles. But the 

 transcendent merit of Henderson's book which 

 marks an epoch in American horticultural litera- 



