1032 
ing, however. It is quite as interesting 
as fruit growing itself, and is capable 
of furnishing liberal education to the 
boys, not to mention the girls 
Some other advantages of dwarf fruit 
trees will be fairly plain without argu- 
ment. They bear fruit at a much earlier 
age than the ordinary trees, often yield- 
ing good crops two or three years after 
planting. The trees being small are eas- 
ier to care for, easier to prune, easier to 
spray. 
It must not be understood that it is 
cheaper to grow fruit in this way, or that 
the dwarf trees are to take the place of 
standard trees in money-making enter- 
prises. We are talking of them now only 
as a first-class entertainment; but they 
do form an almost essential feature in 
the design of a city fruit garden. 
Some Specific Suggestions 
Our country is so large, and its climate 
and soils so diversified, that we cannot 
possibly lay out one fruit garden which 
can be adopted everywhere. Points to be 
kept in mind are: (1) that a consider- 
able diversity of fruit should be put in 
every home garden; (2) that these 
should be chosen according to personal 
taste; (3) that due attention should be 
paid to the adaptability of all varieties 
to the soil and climate; (4) that varieties 
should ripen in succession; (5) that va- 
rieties of fine appearance and high qual- 
ity be chosen in preference to those 
which are commercially successful. 
FRANK A. WAUGII, 
Amherst, Mass 
(Courtesy Woman's Home Companion.) 
*Fruit Trees—Winter Killing of 
About once in each decade, and some- 
times oftener, a severe winter occurs in 
which an unusually large number of 
fruit trees are killed. An examination of 
the orchards after such winters shows 
many irregularities as to the extent of 
the injuries in orchards differently lo- 
cated and managed. Some varieties of 
fruits are uniformly less hardy than oth- 
ers, and the winter injury to these sorts 
* Compiled from Ohio 
Bulletin 15%. 
Experiment Station 
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PRACTICAL HORTICULTURE 
may be traced directly to their greater 
tenderness. On the other hand, trees 
normally perfectly hardy in a locality 
may suffer serious injury or be entirely 
killed during such “test” winters, while 
other trees of the same varieties in the 
same orchard may escape injury entirely. 
During the prolonged cold winter of 
1903-4 great losses were suffered by or- 
chardists in the Lake Erie peach belt. 
Some orchards were entirely destroyed; 
others were apparently uninjured and 
came through the winter in a vigorous, 
hardy condition; and still others, while 
suffering severely, yet contained sections, 
rows or parts of rows, or individual trees 
that came through the winter uninjured. 
Many theories were advanced by the 
orchardists as to the cause of these anom- 
alies, and as many contradictions ap- 
peared. The theory of insufficient drain- 
age, which might be advanced as the 
cause of the injury in one orchard, 
would receive direct refutation in the 
next. If an orchard on elevated ground 
escaped in one instance it might be par- 
tially or entirely killed in another. In 
order to learn the cause of these irregu- 
larities, the horticulturist of the Ohio Ex- 
periment Station and his assistants vis- 
ited both injured and uninjured orchards 
in Catawba island and the peninsula of 
eastern Ottawa county, in Ohio, and made 
a thorough study of the matter, reporting 
the results of their investigations in a re- 
cent bulletin of the station. 
Their investigations show that while 
a@ general or direct cause of the injury 
was, of course, the severe and long-con- 
tinued cold, the specific causes of the 
varying degrees of injury were exceed- 
ingly numerous. Generally speaking, it 
was found that where the vitality of the 
tree or orchard had been lowered by any 
cause whatever during its previous his- 
tory the chances of injury to the tree by 
the cold were by so much increased. Fac- 
tors observed in different orchards 
which contributed to low vitality in the 
trees were an insufficient degree of fer- 
tility, a low physical condition of the 
soils, prevalence of San Jose scale, leaf 
