CHAPTER IV. 



Close Root -Pruning. 



WITH all our knowledge and progress in the other arts 

 and sciences, there is abundant evidence to prove that 

 in the science and practice of horticulture we have 

 retrograded so far that only last year the legislature of New 

 York passed a bill appropriating funds and authorizing the 

 Commissioner of Agriculture to investigate and determine, if 

 possible, the causes for the widespread decadence of the 

 orchards in western New York, both in the matter of the de- 

 creasing health and shortened life of the trees, as well as the 

 inferior quality and diminished yield of fruit. This investi- 

 gation is now in progress, and is awakening great interest in 

 the east. It is a well-known fact that all over the country the 

 same conditions exist that are complained of in New York. 

 While last year gave a phenomenal yield of fruit every- 

 where, it is the first for several years, and not likely to occur 

 soon again, and it is certain that the sturdy fruit trees which 

 delighted the eye with their grand proportions, and tickled 

 the palates of our forefathers with their regular and abundant 

 crops of fine fruit, are a thing of the past. Something cer- 

 tainly is wrong when apple trees cease to be profitable at fif- 

 teen years of age, and peach trees reach their prime in five and 

 die in ten or less, as they do nearly everywhere in our culti- 

 vated orchards, and yet old seedlings in fence corners, chicken 

 yards, old fields and around the back doors are standing up 

 cheerily under the weight of twenty or thirty years ; and Mr. 

 Hale himself drew his inspiration, when he embarked in his 

 successful career of peach growing, from a sixty-year tree 

 that stood in a neglected but friendly fence-row on his ances- 

 tral farm. That there are causes for all this, outside of 

 diminished fertility, want of care or fancied qhange of climate, 

 is certain. 



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