THE PRACTICE OF PBITNING. 



373 



exercises upon the parts it touches, obstructs the free circu' 

 lation of the sap. 



The details of the practice of pruning are so extremely long and minute, 

 that the reader is necessarily referred to special works oa the subject, 

 among the hest of which are George Lindley's Guide to the Orchard and 

 Kitchen Garden, D'Albret's Cours th4orique et pratique de la taille des 

 arbres Jruitiera, and Lep&e On the Peach-tree, tr9,nslated in the 8th 

 Tolume of the Journal of the Horticultural Society. All these works will, 

 however, he the more intelligihle if the reader keeps in view the following 

 leading explanations, chiefly taken from notes by the author, Mr. Thompson, 

 and others, published in the Gardeners^ Chronicle for 1847 and 1848. The 

 woodcuts there employed, and now reproduced, are unsurpassed, if not 

 unequalled, for accuracy and the exact information they convey. 



The Manipulation op Peiwing. 



By pruning is not meant hack- a, b n 



ing or mutilating trees merely to 

 reduce their bulk, nor that sort of 

 random cutting out which is often 

 supposed to be expressed by the 

 name. Those operations belong 

 to plashing and slashing, not to 

 pruning. Pruning is the art of 

 removing scientiftcaUy certain 

 branches, orparts of them. Skilful 

 gardeners have but one way of 

 performing this operation. Their 

 method maybe called "the clean 

 out ;" and consists in removing a 

 shoot by means of a sloping 

 wound, forming an angle of about 

 45°, just at the back of a bud, 

 as at c. The reason is, that as 

 soon as the bud pushes, this 

 wound is readily and rapidly co- 

 vered with new wood. In some 

 trees it will, in fact, heal over 

 in a few weeks. An awkward 

 way of performing this, repre- 

 sented at h, is "the cut to the 

 quick." Here the wound is made ^e 



'Z^'ZZ'IZZ is."""-;'.?- ""*• — «°» 



Dua and the interior of the stem ; the consequence 



Kg. LXIX.— Good and Bad Pruning. 



