CHAPTER IX. 



Growing Trees from Bearing Ones. 



WHILE here and there over the country a few nursery- 

 men recognize the advantage of propagating their 

 stock from bearing trees, and advertise the fact in 

 their catalogues, the great majority of propagators and buyers 

 pay no attention at all to this important subject. There is 

 not the slightest doubt that a tree grown either from a cut- 

 ting, as the Le Conte and Kieffer are here, taken from a bear- 

 ing tree, or one propagated by budding or grafting from such 

 bearing tree, will fruit three or four years, often six or seven, 

 before one grown from a young tree that has for a number of 

 generations been grown from young ones that have never 

 fruited. I drew attention to this important point five years 

 ago in our local papers, and proved it beyond all doubt, by 

 my own experience and that of quite a number of growers 

 elsewhere. Since then I have been watching and experiment- 

 ing in this line, and find that the fruit-bearing principle is 

 carried just as fully by the bud as by the graft and cutting. 

 Four years ago I gave a friend a seedling from a Kieffer pear 

 tree, which bloomed the third year and bore the fourth. The 

 second year of that seedling's life I took some buds from it 

 and top-budded a young Garber pear tree in an orchard of 

 three hundred of that variety and, just like the parent tree, 

 the growth from those buds bloomed the third year, and bore 

 fruit the fourth, though not a single Garber out of the whole 

 lot showed even a blossom. Here is absolute demonstra- 

 tion of the fact that even the bud from a bearing tree will 

 carry the early-fruiting capacity in it. Again, in 1896 in the 

 spring, I took buds from an old, bearing orange tree, and put 

 them into nine Trifoliata orange trees only two years old, 

 here in Galveston, and now, March 6th, eight out of the nine, 

 having made a good growth last season, are coming into full 



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