230 ON THE MANAGEMENT OF FRUIT-TREES INTENDED FOR FORCING. 



its merits ; and with this view, I obtained a duplicate of each by inserting 

 a bud from every seedling plant into a stock, which I placed in the 

 forcing-house. Late in the autumn of the year 1815, some of the young 

 trees, which had been obtained from these buds, were removed from the 

 forcing-house, in which their wood had become most perfectly well 

 ripened, in the preceding summer, to the open air, and were placed, as 

 closely as could conveniently bo done, to the seedling trees of the same 

 varieties, which had grown wholly in the open air : and thus circum- 

 stanced, the blossoms of the trees which had been removed from the 

 forcing-house unfolded nine days earlier, and their fruit ripened three 

 weeks earlier, than those upon the other trees of the same varieties. 



The confinement of the roots to pots, and possibly, to a small extent, 

 the influence of the stock (for the peach-trees in the pots grew upon 

 apricot shoots), may have somewhat accelerated the maturity of the 

 fruit in the experiment last mentioned ; but the chief causes of the early 

 maturity of the fruit in both the preceding cases were, I am confident, 

 the perfect maturity of the wood, and the high state of excitability, which 

 had been acquired by a preternaturally long period of rest. 



It is not, I believe, at all necessary that I should offer arguments to 

 prove that a vine, which cannot be made to vegetate at all in the 

 winter without a very high degree of heat, is not as well calculated for 

 very early forcing as one in which the powers of life are so excitable that 

 it is prepared to vegetate strongly in the temperature of the open air in 

 September, arid in which the power to vegetate in a low temperature 

 will continue to accumulate progressively till spring : but it will probably 

 be objected that as large a crop cannot be obtained from vines of which 

 the roots are confined in pots, as from others. This objection, however, 

 will, I believe, prove to be wholly unfounded, whenever a very early crop 

 is wanted ; for vines and other fruit-trees (as I have observed in former 

 papers) when abundantly supplied with water, and manure in a liquid 

 state, require but a very small quantity of mould. A pot containing two 

 cubic feet of very rich mould, with proper subsequent attention, is fully 

 adequate to nourish a vine which, after being pruned in autumn, occupies 

 twenty square feet of the roof of a hot-house ; and I have constantly 

 found that vines, in such pots, being abundantly supplied with food and 

 water, have produced more vigorous wood, when forced very early, than 

 others of the same varieties, whose roots were permitted to extend 

 beyond the limits of the house. 



