608 



^sOTES or A HORTICULTURAL TOUR. 



It is even cheaper than the system of concrete wall- 

 building elsewhere alluded to. About Lyons I saw miles 

 of wall built in this way^ and numerous houses as well, 

 and I am certain that it can be employed with advantage 

 in growing fruit for the market, and for private use. The 

 earth must be well battered down between boards, and 

 it should not be either too sandy or clayey. The 

 coping here is of tiles, not sloping down on both sides 

 of the wall, but running clean from front to back, the 

 higher side being reserved for the most important crop. 

 Beneath this coping wooden supports, for accommodating 

 a neat straw mat in spring, project about twenty inches 

 from the wall. This may seem to the English cultivator 

 an awkward and untidy mode of protection, but these 

 mats are very neatly and cheaply made in France (as has 

 been already mentioned), and they are of great use in 

 many ways, from placing on the north side of a line of 

 espalier trees to covering frames, and making a temporary 

 coping for walls. For fr'ames alone their introduction 

 would be a benefit to us, as they afford a much better, 

 neater, and cheaper protection than bass mats; and as 

 these have latterly become so dear, they should prove the 

 more acceptable. Espaliers are here occasionally protected 

 with the neat straw mats by simply projecting from the 

 main support two little stays of iron or wood, which 

 carry a rude and cheap span of framework, on which 

 the mats are so placed in spring that the wind cannot 

 blow them off. In looking at a fine specimen of Beurre 

 d^Amanlis here, twenty-eight feet long and eight feet high, 

 with three crowns wrought above the general level of the 

 espalier, and loaded with fruit, M. Morel, the Peach grower, 

 laughingly observed that that kind of tree was not at all a 

 good one for the nurseryman; the upright and oblique 

 cordons planted against walls, and closer than people plant 

 Cabbages, were far better. 



A young plantation of Asparagus here looked somewhat 

 like one of Celery. Trenches and plants were so distanced 

 that each stool was a yard apart from its fellows in every 

 way, and each plant was as carefully staked as if it were a 



