16 



At Kursk we still find it their leading market fruit, and on the 

 Bogdanoff estates, find it being planted in quantity as about the 

 best investment the proprietors know of. Such investments scatter 

 broadcast innumerable little dividends in the form of food and 

 labor. What a blessing to a country is a horticultural aristocracy — 

 it beget', a horticultural peasantry, a home- loving, peace-loving, 

 law-abiding peasantry. In Horticulture, we find the safest 

 anchorage for a peasant population. We asked, at the Bogdanoff 

 estates, why they specially chose Antonovka, and were planting // 

 so largely, and were told it was because it was always a cash article, 

 wanted in quantity for the northern market, for confections, for 

 drying, for bottling in water, &c., and, a tree, in good soil, and in 

 good seasons, can produce its twenty-five poods. 



At the Forestry Convention, in Moscow, Mr. Budd asked" one 

 of the members, who was from Kiev, what were their best com- 

 mercial apples. He called three others, also from the Govern- 

 ment of Kiev, and after consulting together, named Antonovka 

 first. The second upon the list was the Winter Citronen Apfel, 

 a German apple of good quality, but not hardy farther north. 



At Warsaw, where the climate is a cold North German rather 

 than a steppe climate, we find the Antonovka one of their leading 

 apples, but not their best, and there not a late keeper. Throughout 

 this vaste steppe region, the Antonovka is " the " commercial 

 apple, noted for its average annual bearing, its hardiness in 

 extreme climate, its length of life, and fruitfulness in old age in 

 these climates. It is, also, a first-rate nursery tree, a good straight 

 grower. In nurseries, when we found a number of rows of 

 straight-growing healthy trees, all of the same kind, it was sure to 

 be Antonovka. Hence it has '* a nursery run," just as the Ben 

 Davis had in Wisconsin a few years ago, and likely thus to be 

 over-rated ; tut in Central Russia it has been a century on trial, 

 perhaps several centuries, and the quantities of it to be found in 

 the Russian nurseries are grown to meet a known demand. It is 

 a prairie apple suited to rich prairie soils it would seem. It does 

 well on clayey soils and likes moisture. On dry sandy soil the 

 fruit is said to fall from the tree and to be small in size. The 



