« MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



Standards. If his place is small and he does not employ regular 

 help, he is obliged to entrust the transplanting to such aid as he can 

 get at the busiest season of the year, and the chances are that the 

 work is done with as little or less care than careful growers give 

 to transplanting the most easily grown vegetables in the garden. 

 Having secured his trees and had them placed in his grounds, he 

 patiently waits for them to produce fruit similar to the specimens 

 he has seen. Now if his soil happens to be shallow, with a subsoil 

 of gravel or sand, the probabilities are that at the end of five years 

 his dwarf trees have all disappeared, while his standards, with 

 their longer and stronger roots foraging over a larger space, have 

 made some growth, and the earlier bearing varieties have produced 

 some inferior specimens of fruit ; but the result is very unsatisfac- 

 tory, and exhibitions are declared humbugs, and the dealer in 

 trees a fraud. 



The production of good fruit is not the work of chance. The 

 same causes, under the same or similar circumstances, must pro- 

 duce the same or similar results, subject only to the variation of 

 the seasons, and it is well known that man3^ of the largest and 

 best specimens of pears shown at the fall exhibitions are grown on 

 dwarf trees. The quince delights in a deep, strong, moist soil, 

 and grafting the pear upon it does not change the nature or wants 

 of its roots. 



I cannot better illustrate the effects of the soil upon the dwarf 

 pear than by referring to the experience of growers of these trees 

 in Newton. During the past three years the Newton Horticul- 

 tural Society have had the subject of " pear culture" for discus- 

 sion one evening each year, and these discussions have shown this 

 fact, that the opinion of growers as to the general cultivation of 

 dwarf trees vv^as almost exactly determined by their location on 

 one side or the other of the Boston and Albany railroad. It will 

 be remembered that this road runs along at the base of the hills, 

 the land on the north side, between the road and the Charles river, 

 being generally level with a light dry soil, most of it having a sub- 

 soil of gravel or sand, and, unless heavily mulched, suffering 

 severely in dry seasons. Here the dwarf trees, if set in the 

 natural soil, even under the most careful culture, fail ; the roots 

 do not take hold of the soil, and, though they do not die at once, 

 they make feeble growth, and eventually become loose in the 

 ground, and either blow over or are removed as unsightly objects 



