STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY, lOI 



orchards." I was glad to hear him say it because the old trees 

 were grafted from the original trees in Massachusetts and the 

 young trees came from the west. And we older people here 

 never have seen a Rhode Island Greening as good as the old 

 Rhode Island Greenings that we used to have on the old trees. 

 Now if you know trees that are bearing the right kind of fruit — 

 if you know the Gravenstein, if you know the Mcintosh Red, 

 the Wealthy or any others that are growing on trees that stay 

 on as long as they ought to and you have an opportunity to pick 

 them instead of picking them off the ground, you buy 

 any kind of trees from an orchard that has got good 

 roots, and let them grow one year, and then graft 

 from these trees that you know to be satisfactory, that 

 you know to be hardy, that produce the fruit thar you would 

 like to produce, and you will be all right. I have had that thing 

 happen in the state of New Hampshire, clear way up to the foot 

 of the mountains, and I have letters at home thanking me for 

 the scions that I sent them, and stating that they had taken 

 premiums at the state fair from trees that they had grafted from 

 the scions that I sent them on the little seedlings that they 

 picked up around on their farms, where the trees that they 

 bought from the west had not produced an apple yet. Now con- 

 ditions govern everything. Don't you think for a minute that 

 the trees that they grafted in the state of New Hampshire pro- 

 duced fruit any quicker comparatively than the trees they 

 bought in the west, because the seedling trees instead of being 

 a year or two old, may have been five or six or seven or eight 

 years old, you see. I always like for every single identical thing 

 that I possibly can, when I am doing anything of this kind, to 

 see that I am strictly correct. As A. A. Hixon I wouldn't care, 

 but as secretary of the Worcester Horticultural Society, I am 

 mighty careful that what I say will hold water. I pride myself 

 that every single bit of information that I give has been thor- 

 oughly studied from one end to the other. And if you all would 

 do that thing and not jump at conclusions you would be a great 

 deal better off. 



Now just a word, because there are so many ladies present — 

 there are other things besides apples. I don't know what you 

 can grow here but when I was a boy and lived in Bangor, I know 

 they had peaches and plums and grapes and currants and other 



