VL PLANTING. 



211. I have mentioned an application of clay to be 

 used in grafting j but it may be as well here to give some 

 particular instructions as to preparing this, before I end 

 this article on grafting. The object being to put some- 

 thing round the wounded parts of the stock and the scion 

 that shall exclude water and air, it is necessary, of course, 

 that the application be adhesive and close. Pure yellow 

 or blue clay is both, if you beat it well with a good stout 

 stick, now-and-then pouring on a little water to make it 

 work. Get it, in this way, to be perfectly pliable in the 

 hand. Beat it upon a hard stone, or a boarded floor, or a 

 brick floor swept clean first j but beat it again and again, 

 returning to it for two or three days, and taking a spell 

 each day. If you suffer it to remain hard, besides the 

 danger of unsettling the scion in squeezing round it this 

 untractable mass, it cracks, the very first hot day, and is 

 utterly useless. Let it, therefore, be so loose that the man 

 who follows the grafter to put it on, can take off a piece and 

 readily flatten it out into a kind of pan-cake, an inch or so 

 thick, and wrap it, without any exertion on his part, or any 

 resistance on the part of the plant, round the grafted tree. 

 Then he should sprinkle a little wood-ashes over the whole 

 to dry it and take off the immediate effect of the sun. 



212. BUDDING is performed for precisely the same 

 purpose as grafting, and, like grafting, it is performed in 

 many different ways.j but I shall only notice the most 

 usual, and, as long experience has ascertained, the best, 

 method : namely, that of T budding, so called from the 

 form of the two cuts that are made in the bark of the 

 stock to receive the bud (pi. 5. Jig. 1.) j or shield budding, 

 as it is sometimes called, from the form of the piece of 



