ROOT PEUNING AN OLD PEACTICE. 369 



who in his Practical Fruit-Oardener has these words : — " Barrenness 

 proceeds from too great an affluence of sap through those large roots, 

 and therefore those roots ought to be taken off; yet because I have 

 found by experience that there is some danger in the practising this 

 upon old trees, I thought it might not be an unuseful tryal to begin 

 first on young ones, even by taking them clear up once in two or three 

 years, and cutting away all the great roots. This would effectually do 

 what I desired, and it has answered accordingly." The late Mr. Beattie, 

 gardener at Scone Palace, Perthshire, in 1811, out the roots of Peach and 

 Apricot-trees, on a south wall, four hundred feet long, to within two and 

 three feet of the stems ; the result was satisfactory, — over-luxuriance 

 was checked, and fruitfnlness produced. Beattie acted on the principle 

 of depriving the tree of the means of obtaining such a great quantity of 

 sap, thereby preventing it from growing so freely, and of course 

 inclining it to become fruitful. Niool suggests the same expedient, in 

 his Forcing and Fruit- Gardener, fourth edition, p. 240. Indeed no 

 gardener with ordinary powers of observation can have failed to 

 observe the effect produced upon fruit-trees by transplantation, which 

 is a rude kind of root-pruning. It needs but a small amount of 

 physiological knowledge to be aware that if the roots of a plant are 

 large and numerous, the head must be so too, for this plain reason, that 

 the amount of fluid food received hy a plant is in proportion to the size 

 and extent of its roots, and that food must be expended in the formation 

 of branches. There can be no interference with such a law as this. 

 Suppose one tree absorbs twenty pounds of fluid food (or sap), and the 

 other forty pounds, by the roots, aU other circumstances being 

 equal, it is evident that the one will have twice as much organizable 

 matter as the other ; and, as such matter cannot be returned back into 

 the soU, but is irresistibly driven upwards by the force of vegetation, it 

 can only be expended in the organization of leaves and branches ; and 

 consequently the leaves and branches will be twice as large or twice as 

 numerous in the one case as in the other. Of course the reverse of this 

 is equally true. 



It is, however, to Mr. Rivers, of Sawbridgeworth, that we are indebted 

 for pointing out the whole advantage and application of root-pruning, 

 of which he has given a very full account in a paper published in the 

 Proceedings of the Horticultural Society, page 136, and in his own 

 Miniature Fruit Garden, to which the reader is referred. 



We have still to consider that peculiar kind of pruning which 

 is technically called ringmg (Fig. LXVIII.). This consists in 

 removing from a branch one or more rings of bark, by which 

 the return of sap from the extremities is obstructed, and it is 

 compelled to accumulate above the ring. Mr. Knight explains 



