FRUIT UNDER GLASS. 147 
never known it to be grown in quantity successfully away from 
near London. It is a sight ever to be remembered to see the 
span-roof vineries five hundred feet long, forty feet broad, of Mr. 
Peter Kay at Finchley filled entirely with Canon Hall Muscat.: 
Something suits them there that makes them grow finer than 
anywhere else. I conclude by saying, however, that during the 
past thirty years in first-class finished grape growing, as judged 
by the standard of taking the best prizes at all our leading 
exhibitions, Scotland has taken the lead, and I would express 
the wish that she may long continue to hold it. 
THE PEACH AND THE NECTARINE. 
The cultivation of the peach in our climate can only be carried 
on out of doors on walls with a south aspect, and it is only in 
the southern portions of England that you can get peaches on 
open walls of a good size and of a good flavour. I have seen 
finer peaches grown on the open wall at Frogmore, Gunnersbury, 
and other places in the Thames Valley, than eould be grown in 
- peach-cases, without fire-heat, anywhere in the north of Britain. 
If a gardener located in the North of England or Scotland 
should in his holiday go south into Kent and visit, say, Mereworth 
he will observe a great difference in the fruit-gardens of the two 
districts. The great length of walls at Mereworth is covered 
with splendid peach-trees. And if his visit is in the beginning 
of September, he will see the splendid crop of fine fruit, which 
probably will arouse in him, as in Johnson’s Scotsman, a wish 
to remain where he is. We cannot all be in Kent, however, and 
it has struck me on my visits to Kent that gardeners have their. 
difficulties there also, and so we must try with the usual pluck of 
Scotsmen, and as good skilful gardeners, to grow good peaches 
€ven under most unfavourable circumstances. 
The late Lord de Vesci, whom I had the honour to serve as 
gardener for five years, said to me that the peach-trees on south 
walls in his garden at Abbeyleix, Queen’s Co., Ireland, produced 
good crops of peaches yearly up to the date of the potato-failure, 
and that some climatic change must have taken place then. In 
1845 the walls were covered with good peach-trees, bearing good 
crops—twenty-five years later there was not a peach-tree left on 
