PERSONALIA 113 



not stay there long enough to see what came of them. 



The next fruit garden in which I became interested 

 was in Vermont. This had in it some dwarf pear 

 trees, dwarf apples and dwarf plums, and my own 

 personal experience had fairly begun. The dwarf ap- 

 ples proved to be an almost complete failure, for rea- 

 sons which I can not now satisfactorily explain. A 

 few years later I planted a few dwarf apple trees in 

 another Vermont garden, where they did reasonably 

 well. But, at any rate, the whole undertaking was un- 

 satisfactory, for it did not give me a vital understand- 

 ing of the trees. I never got onto terms of real 

 personal goodfellowship with them ; and until a gard- 

 ener does that his work is some sort of a failure. 



The dwarf pears did somewhat better. They seemed 

 to understand their business, and they kept about it 

 without much attention from me. I never cared much 

 for pears, anyway. 



But the plums were the brilliant success, at least 

 with reference to my own interior personal experience. 

 Every plum tree meant something to me. A stub of 

 a root and two scrawny plum branches would at any 

 time arouse my imagination like the circus posters' 

 appeal to a boy. In this Vermont garden which I 

 adopted when it was about four years old, there were 

 various plum trees, mostly of domestica varieties, 

 growing on Americana roots. They had come from the 

 Iowa State College, where they had been educated that 

 way. They had been given those Americana roots, not 

 primarily to dwarf them, but to insure them against 

 damage from the cold winters. The tops had not been 

 cut back, and the whole treatment was just such as 



