LUTHER BURBANK 



take it as a safe general rule that a cion, however 

 grafted, will retain the characteristics of its parent 

 stock, and that the tree on which it grows will 

 be fundamentally uninfluenced, so far as the 

 character of its fruit is concerned, by the intruder. 



It is not at all with the expectation of 

 influencing the fruit product of either cion or 

 stock that the familiar process of grafting is 

 resorted to. The chief object of grafting, as 

 practiced in my orchard, is to economize space 

 and save time. As to the former point, it will 

 be obvious that where scores or hundreds of 

 twigs from different seedlings are grafted on 

 limbs of a single tree, we are enabled to watch 

 developments among these hundred of specimens, 

 and by uprooting the original seedlings to utilize 

 the ground they occupy for other purposes. 



As to time saving, I have discovered that by 

 grafting small cions near the tip of the limbs of 

 the foster parent, instead of near its trunk, the 

 cion comes much earlier to maturity, and bears 

 fruit in the second season instead of waiting until 

 the third or fourth, as it otherwise would do. 



So it is that on a single tree in my orchard 

 almost a thousand different seedlings may be 

 tested simultaneously; and by the practice of 

 selection of early-bearing varieties during the past 

 thirty years, I have produced seedlings of a type 



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