378 



PEARS. 



York, and all the young plantations made in favourable 

 circumstances are doing well about here ; and I may also 

 add, that every one of the kinds that I had twenty-five years 

 ago, I have ,yet. And as we find that the apples are re- 

 covered in England, so the Pears, and the same old kinds, 

 are found to do well in France. As for pears in this coun- 

 try, if Mr. K.'s theory were true, I ask how long it might 

 take before the Pears would run out by age ? About 1000 

 feet from my house stands a Pear tree planted out by Go- 

 vernor Stuyvesant more than two hundred years ago, and 

 looks likely enough to overrun another century. If Mr. 

 Knight should be willing to 'allow from two to three hun- 

 dred years as the period of existence of a tree under the most 

 favourable circumstances, and as this tree may be consider- 

 ed as a seedling, that his theory is still correct, I answer 

 that it is not a seedling : it is evidently a grafted tree, and 

 might have been taken from an old sort at that time. But 

 what will the theory do when applied to the Autumn Berga- 

 mot Pear? Mr. Lindley says, (see No. 42, page 231,) "it 

 is now [1831] one of the best Pears of the season, and it is 

 one of the most ancient . supposed to have been in England 

 ever since the time of Julius Csesar ;" that is, one thousand 

 eio-ht hundred and eighty-seven years ago ! ! I can only 

 add of this same Autumn Bergamot Pear, that the young 

 trees of it are as healthy, and grow as free in my nursery as 

 any of the new Flemish Pears, at this present time. The 

 theory is therefore not true, and some other cause must be 

 found for the occasional decay of fruit trees. As it relates 

 to this country, according to the opinion of many, our cli- 

 mate has experienced a change within the period alluded to : 

 the winters are not so severe or. so long generally as they 

 used to be ; and yet trees that once stood the cold winters 

 uninjured, have since, in milder winters, been killed by the 

 cold, the milder and longer falls causing the sap to remain 

 in the trees to a later period. When cold weather sets in 

 suddenly before the wood is well ripened and hardened, the 

 cold penetrates to the medulla, or pith, whereby it receives 

 a mortal injury, which, although it does not kill the tree at 

 once, it generally dies the next summer, or summer follow- 

 ing. The tree thus injured may be discovered, on cutting 

 the shoots in the spring, by a blackness in the pith ; and al- 

 though I do not think that a tree once injured as above stated 

 can ever be recovered, yet the sort may be preserved by 

 pudding from it on a healthy young stock ; if the bark is un- 



