BUD TRANSFERENCE AND ITS EFFECTS ON FRUIT. 



21) 



have more than entered the threshold of the treasures she has in 

 store for those who make it their happy study how to draw 

 from her treasures that which tends to promote fruitfulness, 

 quality, and beauty in our national range of varied fruit. 

 The glory of success must be therefore the aim and object 

 of the enlightened fruit cultivator, and though the orchard house 

 must ever be able to produce the finest fruit perhaps in appear- 

 ance ; for the true encouragement of the less favoured through 

 want of shelters for their fruit trees from the keenness of our 

 spring storms, it may not, nay, it cannot be the best in true 

 natural flavour or in the exquisite richness of tint and tone of 

 colour, given a favourable season. If we could only guard our 

 trees from frost in the season of blooming and fertilisation, and 

 the tender and interestingly delicate setting stage, I am con- 

 vinced the varying moods of our fickle weather, given too 

 sufficient sun-power, the humble cottager could easily compete 

 with the squire, and dear Old England with foreign countries. 

 Of course that period of anxiety when the process by which the 

 pollen renders the infant fruit fertile must essentially be the 

 most critical period, and all our brothers of the craft know only 

 too well how often our fondest hopes have been dashed to the 

 ground by the advent at that most trying moment of a cruel 

 frost-devouring night. I have smelt in the lovely blossom of a 

 tree, anyone might be pardoned for glorying in, the flavour of 

 the fruit promised, and the next night all has been cruelly 

 devastated and lost as if by a devouring fire, and the tree itself 

 wrecked and ruined, save for tender care and intelligent after- 

 thought and watchfulness ; so then to mitigate as far as possible 

 such a sad catastrophe I repeat the balancing of the roots with 

 the tree must never be lost sight of, otherwise we help the 

 elements to work that painful havoc among our trees that it will 

 take us years to remedy, if hope in regard to such a happy result 

 is not irretrievably lost. 



The process of budding is simple in the extreme, and the 

 trees under my watchful care are all, with only one exception, of 

 mature growth ; some in fact are what I might call old, and it 

 has been with these that I have for years carried on my system 

 of budding with the one wish of rendering them fruitful and the 

 fruit of finer quality. I am sure I cannot say how many years 

 I have been engaged in the work, but quite long enough to speak 



