3i 8 THE NEW GARDENING 



of our best Apples bloom early ; they are fully expanded 

 in April. This leaves the May frost to reckon with. It 

 is not a " hardy perennial." It does not come every 

 year. Its visitations are intermittent. But it comes, 

 and there is nothing more exasperating than to have 

 the work of a year ruined in an hour by a circumstance 

 which, on the face of it, is beyond the grower's control. 



The frost danger is a real thing. It is always lurking, 

 sinister and dangerous, in the rear. Every spring the 

 same grisly spectre rises before the eyes of the fruit- 

 grower, and he never feels safe till June has come. Even 

 a June frost is not unknown. Scientific pruning, scientific 

 feeding, unremitting attention from first to last, all may 

 be of no avail if the frost-fiend appears. 



Injury from frost arises in the blackening of the pistil 

 and stamens. The corolla of the flower may be un- 

 touched. But the fructifying organs and not the petals 

 are the important parts of the flower. If they are 

 shrivelled fruit cannot form. 



Science has not been content to sit helpless and inactive 

 before the frost danger. Growers are fully alive to it, 

 and full of resolution to grapple with it. The grower of 

 Bear-quicks will be in sympathy with them. 



A grower of cordon Bear-quicks can generally save 

 his crop if he is at hand when, with the trees in full bloom, 

 a late frost comes. He can do it by fixing a light screen 

 of canvas just above the trees on that bright, clear, cold 

 night when experience teaches him that a frost may be 

 expected before morning. This checks radiation and 

 prevents injury. A grower of field trees by acres cannot, 

 of course, get out of danger in so simple a way. 



In speaking of the use of thin canvas I might assume 

 that every amateur fruit-grower always has the right 

 thing by him at the right moment. As a matter of fact 



