PHILOSOPHY OF PRUNING. 259 



by which our fruits can be supported. The latter, how- 

 ever, is the ultimate desideratum with fruit-growers, and 

 in our impatience to reap a quick reward, we often resort 

 to measures that tend to curtail the usefulness, size, and 

 beauty, as well as the permanence of our trees. This is 

 an illustration of the axiom, that whatever threatens the 

 vitality of a plant, tends to make it fruitful ; it calls into 

 activity the instinctive effort to perpetuate the species by 

 the production of seed, that may be separated from the pa- 

 rent, and establish a separate and independent existence, 

 to take the place of that, the life of which is threatened. 



Summer pruning and pinching interferes with the growth 

 by extension, and threatens the very life of the tree ; the 

 entire removal of all new shoots and their foliage, and the 

 removal of the successive attempts by the tree at their 

 reproduction, will cause its death in a little while. Their 

 partial abstraction, as practiced in summer pruning and 

 pinching, being an attack of the same kind, results in the 

 formation df fruit-buds. The operations of budding and 

 grafting upon an uncongenial stock, interrupting the cir- 

 culation by ringing, by ligatures, by hacking, twisting, and 

 bending downward, all tend to check the growth by ex- 

 tension, and are attended by similar results, since they are 

 antagonistic to the mere production of wood. Shorten- 

 ing-in the branches of some species, which form their 

 fruit-buds upon the shoots of the current year, has the 

 effect to give them a fuller development, if performed 

 during the summer, but if deferred until the folio whig 

 spring, it will have the directly opposite result, and will 

 cause the production of woody shoots at the expense of 

 the fruit. 



