258 AMERICAN POMOLOGY. 



to the production of fruitfulness in the tree, is to be prac- 

 tised chiefly in the summer. At the same time, or during 

 the growing season, much may be done to advantage, both 

 in thinning-out and shortening-in such parts of the tree, 

 as may need these plans of treatment. Various methods 

 are pursued to produce fruitfulness, all of them depending 

 upon the fact that this condition arises from the natural 

 habit of a tree to make its wood-growth freely for a series 

 of years. After it has built up a complicated structure 

 of limbs and branches, with some consequent obstruction 

 to the flow of sap, depending upon the hardening of the 

 woody tissues, and the tortuous course of its circulation, 

 it then appears to have reached its maturity, or its fruit- 

 bearing condition. It then ceases to make such free 

 wood-growth, and prepares a set of buds, which develop 

 flowers and fruit. 



Now this period of growth and unfruitfulness may con- 

 tinue for a longer or shorter time in different varieties of 

 fruits ; and the shortening of this, is the great object of 

 summer pruning, and of other methods of producing 

 fruitfulness that may be classed under this second head of 

 the objects of pruning. 



To appreciate their importance and the mode in which 

 the effect is produced, we must ever bear in mind the two 

 great acts of vegetable life, that of wood-growth or 

 growth by extension, and the wonderful morphological 

 change of this growth into flowers and fruit. These are, 

 in some sense, antagonistic. The first is essential to the 

 production of timber, to the building up of the tree, and 

 should be encouraged to do its work undisturbed, up to a 

 certain point, that we may have a substantial frame-work 



