THE FRUIT GARDEN. 195 



SECTION 3. THE FRUIT GARDEN. 



The fruit garden is a plantation of fruit-trees, intended 

 to supply the family with fruit. In some cases, where a 

 large supply of fruit is wanted, and the proprietor has 

 land and means to warrant it, a certain portion of ground 

 is wholly devoted to it ; and in others it forms a separate 

 compartment of the kitchen garden, or is mixed with it 

 the fruit-trees occupying the borders, or outsides of the 

 compartments, and the culinary vegetables the interior. 

 The latter is most general, in this country, at the present 

 time. In a country like ours, so well adapted to fruit 

 culture, where almost every citizen not only occupies but 

 owns a garden, and, as a general thing, possesses suffi- 

 cient means to enable him to devote it to the culture of 

 the higher and better class of garden productions, the 

 fruit garden is destined to be, if it is not already, an ob- 

 ject of great importance. In the old countries of Europe, 

 the rich alone, or those comparatively so, are permitted 

 to enjoy such luxury ; for land is so dear that working 

 people are unable to purchase it, and if they are, they are 

 either unable to stock it with trees, or their necessities 

 compel them to devote it to the production of the 

 coarsest articles of vegetable food that can be produced 

 in the greatest bulk. It is not so in America. Here 

 every industrious man, at the age of five-and-twenty, 

 whatever may be his pursuits, may, if he choose, be 

 the proprietor of a garden of some extent, and possess 

 sufficient means to stock it with the finest fruits of the land. 



The present actual state of the population gives abun- 

 dant evidence of this happy and prosperous condition. 

 Let us look at our cities and villages. In Rochester, 

 excepting a narrow circle in its very center, every house 

 has its garden, varying in extent from twenty-five by one 

 hundred feet to an acre of ground, and not one of these 

 but is nearly filled with fruit-trees ; and so it is, but on a 



