CHAPTER IV. 



PROPAGATION BY BUDDING AND GRAFTING, BY LAYERS AND BY 



CUTTINGS. 



WHEN trees are raised from seeds, as before stated, there is no 

 certainty that the same identical variety will be reproduced. In 

 many cases, the shade of variation will be scarcely perceptible ; in 

 others, it will be wide and distinct. It hence becomes desirable in 

 preventing a return towards the original wild state, or, in other 

 words, to perpetuate the identical individual thus highly improved, 

 to adopt some other mode of propagation, for the purpose of multi- 

 plying trees of such varieties as possess a high excellence, instead 

 of constantly creating new ones, with the hazard of most of them 

 proving worthless. 



It will be distinctly remembered, that new varieties must always 

 spring from seeds ; but the same individual variety can be multi- 

 plied only by separating the buds, or shoots bearing the buds, of 

 such individual plant. As an example, the Fall Pippin, when first 

 produced from seed, was a single tree of a new variety. The my- 

 riads of Fall Pippin trees now existing, are only multiplications of 

 the branches of the original. This multiplication or propagation of 

 varieties is effected in several ways : I, by Cuttings ; 2, Layers ; 3, 

 Grafting ; 4, Budding. Without these means of propagation, such 

 delicious sorts as the Green Gage plum, the Elton cherry, and the 

 Seckel pear, could never have been tasted except as picked from 

 the single parent tree. 



In the multitude of different modes of grafting and budding, suc- 

 cess must depend on the observance of certain fundamental princi- 

 ples ; a brief recapitulation in part, of some of these laid down in 

 the second chapter, may not be out of place. 



During the growing season of a fruit-tree, the sap enters at 

 the fibrous roots, passes up through the alburnum or sap-wood, 

 ascends to the extremities of the branches, and is distributed 

 through the leaves. Emerging thus from the dark and minute 

 vessels of the wood, it is spread out and exposed to the action 



