BUDDING ON THE VINE. 35 



BUDDING ON THE VINE.* 



BY M. ALAZAKD. 



Budding* on the vine, considered for a very long time as 

 impossible or very difficult of execution, has now become a 

 very practical system of grafting, owing to a more precise 

 knowledge of its mode of execution, and gives perfect knit- 

 tings; it is attractive in the extreme, and its only fault is 

 that it was discovered too late. Fifteen years ago it would 

 have supplanted the English cleft or whip-tongue graft. 

 The success of this mode of grafting is mainly due to the 

 initiative of a small viticulturist of the Lot (Salgues), who 

 was the first to prove its practical utility, and obtained very 

 satisfactory results with it. There is not another instance 

 in which such a useful innovation has been more vigorously 

 criticised or even combated. After Salgues had given several 

 demonstrations of this system in many of the viticultural 

 regions of France in 1891, numerous trials were made by 

 viticulturists, who, not having succeeded the first time, re- 

 jected it, without trying to ascertain the causes of their 

 non-success. Others deprecated and rejected the system 

 without even giving it a trial, which naturally did not 

 forward its general practice. When we first tried ourselves 

 to practise budding on the vine, we met with many failures y 

 and were also very nearly discarding it. All our scions 

 during the first days of their grafting seemed to remain 

 green, and the buds even seemed to start to swell, as if the 

 knitting had already taken place. This was only a delusion, 

 and almost invariably resulted in deception. At the tenth or 

 twelfth day after the operation the scions suddenly dried up; 

 we could not explain the cause of this failure. But at every 

 new trial we obtained some strikes, and this fortunately 

 induced us to renew our experiments (if 10 per cent, of the 

 scions strike, there is no reason why 100 should not succeed), 

 and so we were encouraged in continuing our experiments. 

 So far we had followed Salgues' directions to the letter, i.e., 

 " that the scion must be taken from the most herbaceous 

 part of the shoot towards its extremity," and we had seen 

 Salgues following this principle at the Government experi- 

 mental nursery at Cahors. 



* Revue de Viticulture, vol. VI., 1896. 

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