ON THE SCIONS. 353 



Species or variety, produce blossoma, or in maldng its blossoms 

 set when produced, success -will probably be obtained in almost 

 all cases by budding or grafting on a stock wbich is nearly 

 engugh allied to the graft to preserve it alive for a few years, 

 but not permanently. The Pear-tree affords a stock of this 

 kind to the Ajpple ; and I have obtained a heavy crop of Apples 

 from a graft which had been inserted in a taU Pear stock only 

 twenty months previously, in a season when every blossom of 

 the same variety of fruit in the orchard was destroyed by frost. 

 The fruit thus obtained was externally perfect, and possessed 

 all its ordinary qualities ; but the cores were black and without 

 a single seed; and every blossom would certainly have fallen 

 abortively, if it had been growing upon its 'native stock. The 

 experienced gardener will readily anticipate the fate of the 

 graft ; it perished in the following winter. The stock, in such 

 cases as the preceding, promotes, in proportion to its length, 

 the early bearing and early death of the graft.'' 



It is sometimes desirable to increase the hardiness of a 

 variety, and grafting or budding appears to produce this effect 

 to a certain extent, not, indeed, by the stock communicating to 

 the scion any of its own power of resisting cold, but by the 

 stock being better suited to the soil of latitudes colder than 

 that from which the scion comes, and consequently re quiring a 

 lower bottom-heatto .arouse jts excitability. Mr. Knight, 

 indeed, denies this fact, because " the root which nature gives 

 to each seedling plant must be well, if not best, calculated to 

 support it ; " and it is so, under the circumstances in which the 

 species was first created ; but, in gardens it is placed otherwise. 

 Probably, in Persia, the native country of the Peach, that 

 species, or its wild type the Almond, is the best stock for the 

 former fruit ; because the temperature of the earth is that in 

 which it was created to grow. But in a climate like that of 

 England, the summer temperature of whose soil is so much 

 lower than that of Persia, the Plum, on which the Peach takes 

 freely, is a hardy native, and suited to such soil, and its roots 

 are aroused from their winter sleep by an amount of warmth 

 imsufficient for the Peach. Experience, in this case, com- 

 pletely confirnas what theory teaches : for, although there may 



