THE HORTICULTURAL AWAKENING OF NEW ENGLAND. t O 



means much to us in the way of better and quicker distribution. 

 The Connecticut Pomological Society, starting- twenty years ago 

 with seventeen members, now has nearly 700, and its summer 

 field meetings, where around tree, plant, and vine, its members and 

 visiting horticulturists discuss practical fruit questions, is perhaps 

 the one greatest factor in our awakening, followed up as it is by 

 associations of kindred nature in the other states and supplemented 

 by farm institutes and grange meetings to the extent of several 

 thousand each year, all culminating in that great New England 

 Fruit Show held in this building in October, 1909. So successful 

 was it that one of far greater magnitude likely to be held this 

 coming fall is attracting the attention of the whole country. 



This horticultural awakening has found its greatest opportunity 

 in the apple, the best, yet most neglected of all our fruits, which in 

 spite of more than 250 years growing in sod without feed or culture, 

 and only an occasional butchery for pruning, has been giving to 

 New England in reasonable abundance fruits of inferior appearance, 

 yet so much superior in flavor and keeping qualities to apples from 

 any other section of the country as to clearly indicate New England 

 as the home of ' 'the apple of quality." 



Beautiful apples from the Far West, superbly graded and packed, 

 coming to our markets in recent years, filling the show windows of 

 fruit stores, so that they and the fruit stand displays have taken 

 on a touch of color never dreamed of until King Apple came to its 

 own, have crowded all else into the background. This tempting 

 of consumers through their eyes has stimulated the apple market 

 more in the past ten years than in the whole century preceding 

 and finally awakened the owners of thousands of New England's 

 old apple trees, so that culture and feeding is rapidly displacing 

 the old-time orchard robbery of mowing and pasture. And as 

 spraying, that prime necessity for the production of good fruit, 

 could not be well and economically done three or more times each 

 season on the old high-top trees, developed through more than two 

 centuries of neglect, a process of beheading or "dehorning" is 

 now being practised, by taking out from ten to twenty-five feet 

 of the central top of each tree, smoothing up and rounding off the 

 edges of all large cuts and painting them heavily. Leaving on all 

 lower branches and suckers, cutting out all dead wood, scraping 



