48 RIVAL SYSTEMS OF VINE-CULTURE. 



1864, when it had a full crop of excellent grapes, weigh- 

 ing, as I have since learned, 476 Ib. In 1865 it bore 

 400 Ib. of grapes; in 1866, three hundred bunches, 

 some of them weighing 5 Ib. It took seven years to 

 furnish the house with bearing wood. The girth of the 

 stem where it enters the house is at this date, May 

 1867, 14 inches. Mr Osborne, an old pupil of Mr 

 Kay's, has ably carried out his preceptor's mode of 

 managing this noble vine ; and I trust it may long 

 remain in robust health, a fitting monument to the 

 memory of one who had few equals as an enthusiastic 

 cultivator of the vine, and one who stands alone as 

 having built a large house and planted it with a single 

 vine to test a theory which some writers of the present 

 day are starting as a new one. 



Having thus placed the " extension " or one- vine 

 system before my readers in the light in which I have 

 long viewed it, I will, as briefly as the subject will 

 admit of, take a review of what is said against the 

 "restrictive" or many- vine system. The opponents 

 of this latter system of vine-culture take their key- 

 note from Mr Cannell, nurseryman, Woolwich, who 

 when gardener at Portnall Park was so unsuccessful 

 as a vine-cultivator, that he has chronicled the death 

 of all the vines he then had charge of, after passing 

 through nine stages of decadence, which Mr Tillery 

 of Welbeck has compared to Shakespeare's seven ages 

 of man, and described in very good verse in the 

 'Nottingham Guardian' of March 15, 1867. Mr 

 Cannell's vines, we are bound to believe, died; but 

 I am quite certain he is in error when he attributes 

 their death to the " restrictive " or one-rod system. I 



