428 THE PARKS AND GARDENS OF PARIS. [Chap. XXIV. 



trees, requiring hardly any attention, and actually permitting of 

 as good a crop of vegetables being gathered from under them as 

 if the trees did not exist. Perhaps there may be a few espaliers 

 in the garden ; but they are usually so very few and so badly 

 managed that little fruit is got from them. It follows, then, that 

 in private grounds there is as a rule no source from which an abun- 

 dant stock of the better kinds of hardy fruit may be gathered. 

 The wisest way to increase the supply of good fruit in any given 

 locality is to plant an orchard, carefully choosing the site, and, 

 above all things, selecting the very best kinds, all perfectly hardy, 

 and such as ripen their fruit every year, be the season what it 

 may. Such an orchard would be very convenient near the garden, 

 in fact might form part and parcel of it ; as however the care 

 required is nearly none, except the pleasant one of gathering the 

 fruit, it would not matter much about its position. The first 

 consideration should be the selection of the most suitable soil 

 available. Not an inch of space of the whole need be lost. All 

 the trees should be allowed to grow as standards, and the crops 

 gathered from them would soon put to shame the crop on the wall 

 or dwarf tree. All the wall, dwarf, and espalier trees might then 

 be exclusively kinds that require some additional heat or atten- 

 tion, or to which the shelter and support of the espalier and the 

 cordon systems are an advantage. As jD^otection of some kind 

 might be provided for most of these carefully-trained trees, it 

 would of course be wise to include among them all the sorts 

 most liable to injury by spring frosts ; and such kinds are so 

 abundant that all the walls and espaliers might well be devoted 

 to them. 



Great improvement in fruit-culture may be effected by the 

 judicious thinning of the branchlets of standard orchard and 

 garden trees. The natural tendency of trees of the Apple order, 

 to which most of our fruits belong, from the HawtJiorn of our 

 hedges to the showy-flowered Chinese Pear, is to produce a dense 

 profusion of bloom, and consequently of fruit. Sheets of white 

 or pink blossoms in spring, and showers of pretty fruit in 

 autumn, usually adorn them. And the tendency is as apparent 

 in the newest and largest Apple and Pear as in one of those 

 American Thorns laden with crowds of bright scarlet haws. For 

 ages and ages man has raised our hardy fruits, until they so vary 



