GRAFTING 187 



to receive a peach graft, and so on with all fruit- 

 trees. There is no objection to selecting as stock 

 any wild pear, cherry, or plum tree that may have 

 sprung up of itself in hedge or thicket. It is thus 

 for example that the cherry is grafted on two others 

 of like sort, the wild cherry and the cherry of Saint 

 Lucia, both frequenters of uncultivated hillsides. 

 The first bears fruit hardly as large as a pea, black, 

 round, and full of a very dark and rather bitter 

 juice ; the second has still smaller fruit with scarcely 

 any pulp and uneatable. No matter: with grafts 

 from a suitably chosen source they will cover them- 

 selves with the finest cherries. In like manner our 

 superb garden roses can be grown on the wild rose 

 stock, the common dog rose of the hedges, whose 

 modest blossoms have only five petals of a pale car- 

 nation color and are well-nigh odorless. Some- 

 times, again, two species of similar characteristics 

 are chosen for grafting purposes. Thus the pear 

 grafts well on the quince-tree, the fruit of the latter 

 being, after all, a sort of big pear; the apricot can 

 be grafted on the plum; the peach on the plum and, 

 still better, on the almond, so like the peach in its 

 foliage, its early blossoming, and the structure of 

 its fruit. 



"As a curiosity let us mention the mixing of sev- 

 eral kinds of fruit on the same stock. By means of 

 grafting the same tree can bear, all at one time, al- 

 monds, apricots, peaches, plums, and cherries, be- 

 cause these five kinds admit of reciprocal grafting; 

 another tree may be covered simultaneously with 



