PREFACE. 



A MAJf born on the banks of one of the noblest and most fruitful 

 rivers in America, and whose best days have been spent in gardens and 

 orchards, may perhaps be pardoned for talking about fruit-trees. 



Indeed the subject deserves not a few, but many words. " Fine 

 fruit is the flower of commodities." It is the most perfect union of the 

 useful and the beautiful that the earth knows. Trees full of soft 

 foliage ; blossoms fresh with spring beauty ; and, finally, — fruit, rich, 

 bloom-dusted, melting, and luscious, — such are the treasures of the 

 orchard and the garden, temptingly offered to every landholder in this 

 bright and sunny, though temperate climate. 



" If a man," says an acute essayist, " should send for me to come a 

 hundred miles to visit him, and should set before me a basket of fine 

 summer fruit, I should think there was some proportion between the 

 labor and the reward." 



I must add a counterpart to this. He who owns a rood of proper 

 land in this country, and, in the face of all the pomonal riches of the 

 day, only raises crabs and choke-pears, deserves to lose the respect of all 

 sensible men. The classical antiquarian must pardon one for doubting 

 if, amid all the wonderful beauty of the golden age, there was anything 

 to equal our delicious modern fruits — our honeyed Seckels, and Beurres, 

 our melting Rareripes. At any rate, the science of modern horticulture 

 has restored almost everything that can be desired to give a paradisi- 

 acal richness to our fruit-gardens. Yet there are many in utter igno- 

 rance of most of these fruits, who seem to live under some ban of expul- 

 sion from all the fair and goodly productions of the garden. 



Happily, the number is every day lessening. America is a young 

 orchard^ but when the planting of fruit-trees in one of the newest States 

 numbers nearly a quarter of a million in a single year ; when there are 

 more peaches exposed in the markets of New York, annually, than are 

 raised in all France ; when American apples, in large quantities, com- 

 mand double prices in European markets ; there is little need for enter- 

 ing into any praises of this soil and climate generally, regarding the cul- 

 ture of fruit. In one part or another of the Union every man may, 

 literally, sit under his own vine and fig-tree. 



