PRUNING. 29 



nourishment, care, and attention are given her. Nature never 

 allows man to be her debtor. Whatever he does for her intelli- 

 gently, she is sure to pay him back again with large interest. 

 Yet how thoughtless, how blind we are, not to study her laws 

 more closely, and follow them more strictly. There are millions 

 of trees sold and planted every year which die, or if they live, 

 never amount to anything, simply because those setting them out 

 ■do not study Nature's laws and treat trees intelligently. 



This can be seen anywhere you go, and you will hear a large 

 number of farmers today denouncing fruit as an unprofitable crop 

 to raise. Now this no doubt is true from their practice and 

 experience, but it is all wrong and need not be so. The innocent, 

 neglected, and abused tree is all right and should not be condemned 

 or rejected as unprofitable because of man's ignorance, laziness, 

 or shiftlessness and, I might add, because of his sinfulness in 

 being so careless with the good things given us by an all-wise 

 Creator, who gave us the trees with their many kinds of fruits, 

 who causes the various kinds of trees all standing in the same 

 kind of soil, all fertilized alike, one to bear an apple, one a pear, 

 one a cherry, one a peach, and so on ; who caused the apples, 

 some to ripen in summer, others to ripen in the fall, and still 

 others throughout the winter and spring ; some to be sweet, others 

 to be sour ; some to be yellow, some green, others striped and 

 red, so that all tastes and fancies can be pleased ; who causes the 

 spring-time to come with its green verdure and beautiful and 

 fragrant blossoms ; the seed-time and later the summer and 

 autumn, with their fruits and harvest. Surely God is all love and 

 all goodness unto man. 



Are we guiltless if we always take from the tree and return to it 

 little or nothing? Has man nothing to do, that he may receive 

 and enjoy these luscious and health-giving fruits? Should he 

 merely set the roots of a tree into the soil and then leave it to 

 combat with starvation and neglect, as thousands of trees through- 

 out New England are left to do? Ride through the country and 

 notice the many orchards stsindiug, sod-bound and in wet 

 undrained soil perhaps, with all that can be grown from the soil 

 in the way of hay and pasture taken off and not a penny-worth of 

 fertilizer added to it for the trees. Not a dead limb cut out, to 

 say nothing of those chafing or growing crosswise, not an insect 

 destroyed ; and the poor tree — how it is trying to do its best while 



