The Pome Fruits. 39 



Section 2.— The Pome Fruits 



41, The pome fruits are so called from ilie structure of 

 their fruit, which is a pome, i. e., a fleshy fruit containing 

 two or more carpels ^ in a pulpy expansion ot the flower 

 stem or calyx tube. The principal cultivated pome fruits 

 are the apple {Pyrus malus), the imported crab apple [Pi/riis 

 baccata), the pear {Pyrus communis), the sand pear {Pyrus 

 Sinensis), and the quince {Pyrus Cydonia or Cydonia V7il- 

 garis). These are trees or large shrubs, with firm, fine- 

 grained wood. The flower buds, which are nearly or quite 

 as resistant to cold as the leaf buds, are always terminal 

 on the part that bears them, hence, if the part continues 

 to live, it must branch farther back. This explains the 

 crooked and scraggy fruiting wood of these trees. The 

 fruitfulness of the pome fruits is commonly less regular 

 than that of the stone fruits, where the flower buds of the 

 latter are not injured in winter. 



Productive varieties of the pome fruits often bear exces- 

 sive crops alternate years, and little or no crops the inter- 

 vening years. A frost sometimes cuts off the crop over a 

 considerable section of the country, and as a result of the 

 rest thus enforced upon the trees, the orchards bear abund- 

 antly the following season, in consequence of which the 

 more productive varieties fail to bear the next year. The 

 third season these trees will again bear abundantly, and 

 the fourth year the crop will fail, and so on. This has 

 given rise to the opinion held by some people that these 

 fruits bear only on the odd or even year, as the case may 



> A carpel is one of the parts of a compound seed vesseL 



