CHAPTER IX 

 WALL GARDENING 



Every one who wishes to protect fruit from thieves, every one who has 

 to do with sloping land, and every one who has even a rudi- 

 mentary love of privacy will find an important message here 



WE ARE bound to come to it! The day will surely come 

 when there will be thousands of miles of high brick walls 

 in America too high for thieves to climb over. For in 

 a few centuries America will be as crowded as England or, at least, 

 the land will contain all the people it can support^ There will be 

 thieves then and they will want the fruit. Common fruit may even 

 then be grown in big orchards without walls, but the finest fruit 

 will be grown on dwarf trees, in private gardens, behind high walls 

 of brick or stone. 



All this is a shocking thing to say, and it has required a whole 

 year for me to screw my courage up to^the point of saying it. For 

 the expense of such a system of gardening?!toormous. But there 

 are only two other alternatives. One is to do^^yJiput the best 

 fruit; the other is to employ the high hedge. The la^tcertainly 

 costs less than a wall at the beginning, but is it any cheapei>in the 

 end? Consider the cost of trimming privet three times a 

 for a hundred years! Will privet last that long? Remember tha 

 it may take twenty years of your life to grow a perfect hemlock 

 hedge eight feet high. And weigh this carefully: Walls do not 

 steal plant food from the soil; hedges do. You must either buy 

 more fertilizer every year or else make a partition of some kind 



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