CHAPTER XX. 



A Review. 



THE preceding chapters are part of the original New 

 Horticulture, published twelve years ago by myself, 

 because no publisher would bring out what one of them, 

 after looking over the manuscript, called " a mess of non- 

 sense." When I penned them 1 little thought I should live 

 to see even the faintest streak of dawn that would usher 

 in the happy "Emancipation" day for the fruit-growers 

 of the world. Instead of the easy, delightful and profitable 

 occupation that horticulture should be, when followed in 

 accordance with nature's laws, it has now become, through 

 a strange, unaccountable perversion of those laws, appar- 

 ently from its very beginning, so burdened with fallacious 

 theories and costly methods, that to be a horticulturist, 

 according to the present accepted orthodox teachings, is 

 to be merely a " hewer of wood and drawer of water" for 

 the railroads, the middlemen, the box factories and the 

 day-laborers. Realizing that all this was coming through 

 the enormous plantings of fruit trees by the cheap and 

 easy method of root-pruning, and seeing that the princi- 

 ples of the New Horticulture, the fruit-grower's only salva- 

 tion, were making slow headway through the determined 

 opposition of nearly all the experiment stations, professors 

 and many of the largest fruit-growers of the country, about 

 six years ago I moved to Lampasas, to institute crucial ex- 

 periments in sod culture. Up to that time root-pruning and 

 other of its principles were being rapidly adopted by pro- 

 gressive fruit men, but the one horticultural pill that gagged 

 even them was non-cultivation. Knowing that this was the 

 most important principle of them all, I determined to so 

 sugar-coat it by the exhibition of perfect fruit thus grown as 

 to induce them to swallow it also, and at the same time 



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