1^2 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



important to shade the earth around growing plants, and 

 keep down evaporation. Still, do we not, by inverting the 

 soil and putting the humus at the bottom instead of the top, 

 where nature puts it, and also by exposing the pulverized 

 surface to the leaching of heavy rains, which carry off far 

 more soluble plant food than is appropriated by the trees, 

 really do our orchards more harm than good ? We cultivate 

 and crop our lands until, if no fertilizer is added, they ulti- 

 mately refuse to produce, and we turn them out as old fields. 

 Nature then plants them with trees, and not only grows a 

 vigorous crop from year to year, but rapidly renews the 

 fertility of the soil itself by depositing vegetable matter on 

 the surface where, exposed to air, heat and moisture, it is 

 continually rendering plant food soluble, and returning it to 

 the storehouse of the earth. Why, if nature can rear an 

 immense forest growth on impoverished land, and in the 

 course of time return it to us rich, cannot we grow fruit trees 

 by the same method ? The leaves, grass clippings, and 

 annual dying of the surface roots of the sod, leave the 

 vegetable matter just where the elements can, through its 

 decomposition, prepare food for the tree roots, to supplement 

 which I propose an annual top-dressing. And yet, reason- 

 able and natural as this treatment of an orchard is, men will 

 theorize about the vast excess of evaporation from a sod sur- 

 face over a cultivated one, and demonstrate to a certainty 

 how superior the latter must be ; but nature laughs at them, 

 with her vigorous and productive old seedling trees, in out- 

 of-the-way places, while everywhere throughout the country, 

 continually, cultivated trees become diseased early, fail to 

 bear regular crops, and die young. 



