14 



TARRYTOWN LETTERS. 



hotel tables it is used to check consumption. The 

 servants won't eat it. English cities are depending 

 on us for cider apples, but they don't want rub- 

 ber Greenings or corky Baldwins even for that pur- 

 pose." 



Mrs. Tarryer was once Po/noiia of a Grange, and 

 she set her brother nurserymen of the Order in a 

 good deal of a flutter for their craft by describing 

 in open meeting how apple-trees are manufactured 

 now by wholesale : ' ' There may be blocks of fifty 

 or a hundred thousand trees or more ready for 

 market in the ground any October. These are cut 

 under the roots by horse-power, pulled up and laid 

 in trenches handy for the drive of spring trade 

 and packing. Then the ground where they stood 

 is plowed and every bit of a root as big as my little 

 finger, or a pipe-stem, is gathered and stowed away 

 for making what are called 'root-grafts,' at $2 to ^4 

 a thousand, packed in barrels. Prunings of the 

 next year's sale-stocks are cut as wanted for scions, 

 and skilled hands are kept busy all winter in warm 

 quarters grafting these bits of roots. So anybody 

 who can plant onions and cabbage-stumps for 

 greens in spring can be a nurseryman. It may, 

 and probably does happen, by this system, that our 

 oldest varieties of fruit have been beheaded and 

 stuck upon alien roots as many as fifty times over. 

 The wonder is, brethren and sisters, that any 

 characteristic virtue of a variety should remain 

 after this treatment. True to name apples may be, 

 but in practice the orchardist finds, that by the 

 mingling of divers nursery-stocks — transported and 

 exchanged in every direction — that we are never 

 sure of receiving two trees bearing fruit exactly 

 alike, even of the inferior qualities, or roots that 

 agree with the subsoils of any section. As new 

 crops of dupes spring up hither and yon, this 

 ignorant and nefarious trade continues, and many 

 orchards are planted after this fashion, but rarely 

 a single one that is good for anything." 



Tree-agents have a great respect for Mrs. 

 Tarryer. When a good-looking youngster comes 

 along, who appears as though he was a beginner, I 

 have known her to invite him into the sitting-room 

 and treat him with as much distinction and kind- 

 ness as if she had six or seven marriageable daugh- 

 ters. He never gets a chance to draw his pictures 

 on her. It is //tv books, correspondence and pict- 

 ures he is kept busy with till dinner-time, so that he 

 forgets all about his trade. After dinner she'll have 

 him out in the garden, in the season of it, and show 

 him her own nursery and fruit and floral treasures, 

 and if the youngster evinces any particular sensi- 

 bility to treatment — interest in the real-life sciences, 



etc., she sometimes gives him a small sum of money, 

 if she finds he needs it, to buy the books she recom- 

 mends to him. 



One such young man she rather fell in love with 

 and induced to stay over night with us. When she 

 had taken leave of him at the foot of the lane next 

 morning, she came back glowing like a middle- 

 aged angel, saying, "I do v&zWy think, Alonzo, thai 

 lad will go into some better business. He says he 

 shall. His father and mother 7ieed him at home 

 and he says he's going back there to plant a gardc7i. 

 He's engaged to a lovely young girl and she wants 

 him. Isn't it dreadful to imagine a young fellow 

 like that, lendmg himself to the scattering of weed- 

 pests, peach-yellows, and all the insects and fung- 

 ous plagues one can think of — diseases for aught 

 we know — along with good-for-nothing fruit-trees, 

 which people only buy out of pity or to get rid of 

 him ! " 



She remembers when her father paid ^4 for two 

 accursed cling-stone peach-trees, which blasted all 

 the orchards in the neighborhood with the yellows, 

 while her mother was selling or giving away the 

 most beautiful seedling trees, true to name, for 

 twenty-five cents a dozen — she furnishing a spade 

 for the digging. These varieties had been proven, 

 locally, by the strictest pomoiogical judges the 

 world ever saw. 



Except, perhaps, for drumming the parents of 

 thieving children into fruit-planting, and making 

 the taste for some fruit common in crude markets, 

 among people that never had any before, Mrs. 

 Tarryer insists that nurserymen to date have been 

 a detriment to the country. " Had people been let 

 alone they would surely have served themselves 

 far better. " 



While I am writing she hands me a London Gar- 

 den for August loth of the current year, with a 

 page on the " Evils of Grafting." The editor 

 seems up to his neck in a controversy that must 

 have been going on for a long time. He's sharp 

 for the right, and has learned that grafted rhodo- 

 dendrons are growled at in this country. Seeds of 

 European common-sense sown by valiant Eugene 

 Baumann the elder, and others, have taken root 

 here. He maintained, stoutly, that only seeds of 

 our own R. Cataiubiensc should be used. The 

 London editor knows, and has named, in a previ- 

 ous number, some English nurseryman who propo- 

 gate rhododendrons by layers, and grows many 

 other things upon their own roots, that have been 

 habitually and needlessly crippled by grafting or 

 budding. "When we planted an orchard some 

 years ago " — (says the English editor, and God 



