210 New and Cheap Method 



here, been called away from the fact that, with walls, we can pro- 

 duce first-class fruit, and without them do little or nothing with the 

 choicer kinds. The " power of the climate" about Paris may be 

 considered very wonderful by some people, but there is one thing 

 which it cannot do, and that is, produce better peaches than I 

 have often gathered from walls both in England and Ireland. Over 

 the greater part of the country, without question, the peach may be 

 grown to the highest degree of perfection, and yet, though few 

 Englishmen could manage, as Johnson did, " seven or eight large 

 peaches of a morning before breakfast began," they may well say 

 with him that getting "enough" of them was indeed a rarity. It 

 is stated in a recently published book on fruits that for the majority 

 of the population to partake plentifully of peaches, " the only hope 

 that can be held out involves nothing less than an emigration across 

 the Atlantic !" The present state of matters justifies the writer in 

 the remark. The quality of the peaches sold at the lowest, but by 

 no means a low price, is such as to prevent anybody making a 

 second investment in them, and therefore the fruit is, as the 

 writer remarks in describing it, " a luxury confined to the wealthy." 

 Before it is otherwise, good fruit must be sold at a price that will 

 put it within tasting reach of others than those provided with a 

 powdered footman to convey it from the fashionable fruiterer's to 

 the carriage waiting at the end of the " Row." 



I assert that we can grow the peach as well and as cheaply as the 

 French by paying it special attention in the market-gardens, while 

 it should be planted to a much larger extent in private gardens and 

 receive increased attention therein. And so of our other better 

 fruits. But walls are expensive in construction, and therefore 

 the general adoption of this new kind will be productive of much 

 good. However, my present object is to point out, not so much 

 the advantage of walls, as the fact that for the future they may 

 be made very much cheaper and better than ever by the adoption 

 of Tail's apparatus for making cheap concrete walls, as one vital 

 objection to walls has hitherto been their expense. From the 

 first moment of seeing that very simple and excellent method in 



