312 



Fruit Trees. 



Vol. XII. 



equal, proportionally divided, mutilated or 

 shortened. On these principles, if the top 

 of a tree be wholly cut off, a sprout from the 

 root or neck can possess only a part of the 

 natural vital force or longevity appropriate 

 to that tree : and although obvious conside 

 rations will make the new shoot grow more 

 vigorously for a time, it will finally die soon- 

 er than the originally unharmed tree would 

 have done in its place. But if we take no- 

 thing but a scion or a piece of root, or a sin- 

 gle bud from a tree, we have only a email 

 part of the original vital force of the seed ; 

 and this State is, at this moment, full of facts 

 from one end to the other, to show that the 

 actual longevity is, in all such cases, greatly 

 diminished. The principle Jiere maintained 

 is, that every lime the seedling tree is di- 

 vided, whether in root or top, its natural 

 longevity and appropriate vital force, de- 

 rived from the seed, is proportionally di- 

 vided, abstracted and shortened; and we 

 fully believe that some of the worst forms of 

 hereditary, and also of annual diseases, flo\v 

 from a succession of such mutilations through 

 a series of generations, or are produced by 

 an effort of nature to resist and repair this 

 interference with her natural processes, as 

 we shall hereafter show. 



In view of these positions, two things 

 should be remembered: first, that there are 

 trees, vines and shrubs, the natural vital 

 force of whose roots, necks or trunks pro- 

 duced from seed, is so great, that they for 

 ages continue to throw up shoots, and thus 

 continue their natural life to so great a 

 length of time, that even if the same gene- 

 ral law holds in reference to them, it can 

 never probably be ascertained, or if ascer- 

 tained, would be of no practical importance. 

 When a shrub, or vine, or tree, has the 

 power of continuing its natural life, or of 

 unfolding the vital force of the original seed 

 by shoots, layers, or otherwise, through hun- 

 dreds and thousands of years, two things are 

 true: one generation of men do not live long 

 enough to ascertain whether the seedlings 

 of such plants will outlive the cuttings or 

 layers taken from them, though in all proba- 

 ibility they would; and second, the shortened 

 and mutilated life is long enough for all 

 practical purposes at least, whatever may 

 be true in theory. It is not only difficult 

 but useless to study the laws of longevity of 

 such plants, as for e.xample are the grape, 

 •currant, and many of our forest trees and 

 shrubs. But when the natural life of a val- 

 uable seed does not exceed fifty or a hundred 

 years, it becomes of the highest importance 

 to the cultivator to ascertain the laws and 

 principles upon which that life is necessarily 

 •diminished and shortened, especially if such 



shortening is liable to be great, and also at- 

 tended by incurable hereditary and chronic 

 diseases throughout the entire life of many 

 of the thus mutilated trees. 



Suppose, for example, the natural life of 

 the apple seedling one hundred years. Sup- 

 pose that the most careful grafting or bud- 

 ding into an entire seedling stock still di- 

 minishes the natural life to seventy-five 

 years on an average: this, considering the 

 importance of the supposed change, is toler- 

 able. But suppose that by a further mutila- 

 tion and division of a seedling root into some 

 twenty pieces, the natural vital powers of 

 the original seed is divided into as many 

 parts, giving an average longevity of only 

 twenty years, or even far less than that; 

 this, surely, is intolerable; and yet this in- 

 tolerable condition of things is the real con- 

 dition of one half the best apples, and al- 

 most all the best pairs in this State. A good 

 judge could tell how an orchard fifteen years 

 old, in this State, was promulgated and graft- 

 ed, simply by riding past it. Trees made 

 from buds alone, will die out in large quan- 

 tities the first five years — those made of 

 slips of root two or three inches long, will 

 be generally gone in fifteen or twenty years, 

 while those put upon larger pieces, or upon 

 the tap-root of a seedling, or upon a sprout 

 from the neck of a vigorous tree, will rarely 

 live over twenty-five years. 



Multitudes of apple trees in this vicinity, 

 which have been mutilated and grafted on 

 sprouts and pieces of roots, through several 

 generations of trees, have come into the 

 same state that most of our pears, so treated, 

 have already attained, viz: a condition of ei- 

 ther hereditary or chronic disease, which ex- 

 poses them to perish suddenly, just as the 

 pear does, even when ten or twelve inches 

 through, by what is called the "sun-blight," 

 "frozen sap-blight," &c., &c , and if the 

 same processes of grafting should be contin- 

 ued as long upon the apple as they have been 

 upon the pear, I cannot doubt that it will be- 

 come as difficult to make our grafted apples 

 live to twenty years of age, as it is now to 

 make our pears live that length of time. 



So far as facts have been made public, I 

 should suppose that the practical results of 

 this mutilation in grafting, were developing 

 their true nature more rapidly here than in 

 any other part of the Union, or at least far 

 more strikingly: and this, too, would be na- 

 turally expected; for in a soil so excessively 

 rich as this, all trees come to maturity and 

 decay more rapidly than on a poor soil. This 

 is true of almost all our forest trees. More- 

 over a rich soil operates to hasten the devel- 

 opment of chronic and hereditary diseases in 

 trees, by the same law that high living tends 



