32 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



tap-roots instead of one, at the same time sending them 

 much deeper than a seedling will. I have repeatedly dug Le 

 Conte pear trees thus treated in spring, and by fall found four 

 feet of almost perpendicular roots, and then left them still 

 going down. (See the pear tree I hold in my right hand, page 

 eleven.) I once dug, on the 3rd of July, a spring-set tree, 

 and broke the roots at three feet below the surface, and this 

 on unbroken prairie sod, with a so-called hard-pan subsoil, 

 into which a post hole could not be dug except with a ground 

 auger ! The grass was killed with a hoe and the ground kept 

 clean with the same, and top-dressed well with cotton-seed 

 meal raked in. The top measured four feet when dug. The 

 penetrating power of tree roots is almost incredible. Nobody 

 here, on Galveston Island, where ground cisterns are often 

 used, will dare to plant a willow or china tree anywhere near 

 one. I saw an instance where a willow had driven its roots 

 through a twelve-inch brick and mortar wall and rilled up the 

 interior almost entirely. I could fill this entire chapter with 

 instances of the wonderful penetrating power of root-pruned 

 trees, to which the firmest soil seems to oppose not the 

 slightest obstruction, but will cite only one a Herbemont 

 grape vine at Hitchcock, grown from a cutting, where it 

 stood for six years, and of large size. I cut the roots to one- 

 inch stubs and top to twelve inches, after planting about six 

 inches deep the second time, in as small a hole as I could 

 make, in ground never broken, at my back door. It was top- 

 dressed with bone and ashes, after ramming as tight as a post. 

 It grew two six-feet canes the first year, bore full the sec- 

 ond, covered a thirty-feet trellis the third, and now rambles 

 half over a large cottonwood tree, and has borne annually 

 immense crops of grapes, with never a spraying or a sign of 

 disease, while all the cultivated Herbemonts in the neighbor- 

 hood rot nearly every year. It has had liberal dressings of 

 bone and ashes for eight years, and been cultivated entirely 

 with the hoe. 



As still further demonstrating the superiority of nature's 

 method of a firm, unbroken soil for seedling and close root- 

 pruned trees, I will say that a part of my Kieffer orchard at 



