56 INFLUENCE OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 



tion of varieties, the improvement of those selected sorts, 

 to the highest degree of perfection, is only to be attained by 

 skilful culture.* 



INFLUENCE OF PRODUCTIVENESS. 



When fruit is thick upon the branches, both size and fla- 

 vor are diminished. Many kinds are rendered nearly worth- 

 less by overbearing. It is often observed that early apples 

 and peaches, remaining last on the tree, are much more de- 

 licious than the earlier portions which ripened on crowded 

 limbs. With some varieties, the effect of productiveness is 

 so great as wholly to alter the character. A tree of the 

 Heath Cling, before unknown to the person who raised it, 

 bore the first year a very abundant crop ; and the fruit, 

 which had been recommended as of great size and excel- 

 lence, was small, green, with only a disagreeable, bitter 

 tas-te. In the warmer and longer summer of the following 

 year, the fruit, which had been thinned by the frost, was 

 three inches in diameter, very handsome, and of sweet and 

 excellent flavor. The importance of understanding these 

 influences, before deciding on the quality of a new fruit, is 

 at once evident. The advantages of pruning are to be as- 

 cribed in part to the same cause. 



* The influence exerted by the graft on the stock, although not strictly within the 

 Jmits of thi chapter, offers an interesting subject for inquiry. The extension of 

 the wood of the slock, by successive depositions from the leaves of the graft, and 

 through the cellular system of the bark, so as to preserve the strict specific identity 

 of the wood of the former, is familiar to every practical cultivator. But the graft 

 often exerts a modifying influence. The same seedling cherry stocks, grafted with 

 sorts of different degrees of vigor, soon vary in the amount and size of the fibrous 

 soots. Trees of the Imperial Gage and Jefferson plum, a few feet high, when bud- 

 ded on the wild plum, were found to have only half the amount of roots possessed 

 by the unbudded stock, of the same age. " A graft of the Green Newtown Pippin," 

 says Dr. Kirtland, " will invariably render the bark of the stock rough and black 

 (the habit of the variety,) within three years after its insertion." 



