284 The Canadian Horticulturist. 



and one who delights in nature in her mysterious formations and her modest 

 yet charming landscapes, I know of no section that will afford him a greater 

 or more varied pleasure than the one of which I write. Just why nature 

 presents to us her wonderful handiwork in 



" Rock-bound wall and mountain height, 

 In silvery lake and meadow vale," 



I cannot tell. But in it all we see a design for man's happiness and com- 

 fort. If that design has not accomplished its fullest fruition, if the dweller 

 in the Grimsby Valley be not among the happiest of mortals, it must surely 

 be owing to some fault of his own, or to some condition not a tenet or attri- 

 bute of the great architectural design. 



On the morning after returning from the summer meeting at old Niagara 

 — that birth-place of our Canadian nationality, and the cradle of Canadian 

 patriotism — Mr. Pettit hitched his pony to the phaeton and we started for 

 a drive down the old Grimsby Road to the Methodist Park, a distance of 

 about six miles, calling at several farms and picking up one or two friends 

 by the way. The first stopping place was at the farm of Mr. Geo. W. Cline, 

 whose genial owner joined us in our trip. Mr. Cline's farm comprises one 

 hundred acres, all, except the mountain side, and indeed some of that, in 

 fruit. Though his vineyard is extensive, and his apple and peach orchards 

 by no means insignificant, his specialty is plums, having upwards of 2,000 

 trees, from full bearing down to only one year after planting. He estimates 

 his crop of plums this j^ear at about 1,500 baskets, and he was about selling 

 the lot on the trees to a fruit syndicate at a remunerative figure. Continuing 

 our trip eastward we passed farm after farm, all more or less covered with 

 orchard, vineyard and berry patch. Many of them, I noticed, were kept in 

 excellent order and scrupulously clean. Among the latter, the model, I 

 think, so far as could be judged from a passing view, belonged to a member 

 of the Woolverton family. Just here I might remark that it was a matter 

 of surprise to one like myself, unaccustomed to that class of farming, how 

 the great majority of the farms we visited or passed by were kept in such 

 good order with so little help. Here in my own county of Perth, where only 

 the old method of mixed farming is pursued, no farmer calculates to work a 

 hundred acres with less than two farm hands ; yet I found all these farmers 

 along the Grimsby Road working, as a rule, 100 acres in fruit with but two 

 men. Mr. M. Pettit, with his 175 acres — too much for a fruit farm — kept 

 only two hired hands, and I found his thirty acres of vineyard, eight or nine 

 acres of black berries and forty or fifty acres in apple, pear and peach 

 orchard, surprisingly clean and well-worked with plow or horse hoe. The 

 same might be said of all the farms, to a greater or less degree, in the section, 

 unless it be a few in the hands of unprogressive owners, whose names, I 

 would venture to say, are not among the list of subscribers to The Horti- 

 culturist. 



