2 
R. M. KELLOGG'S GREAT CROPS ON 
known to be superior his services command 
large sums and are sought for by the most 
skillful breeders. The premium is awarded to 
the individual and not to the class to which he 
belongs. 
Look at the Prize-WLiiners in horticulture. 
They go through their orchard picking a speci- 
men from this tree and that until the collec- 
tion is made. The tree that is loaded year 
after year with the finest fruit, true to type, 
high in color, rich in flavor, its perfect foliage 
and smooth trunk indicating perfect health, 
and has stood the blasts of our severest win- 
ters is entirely ignored in your awards. The 
same is true of the vine or plant standing 
among its commonplace fellows and yielding 
the most magnificent fruit, veritable sweep- 
stakes at your meetings, but the vines or 
plants, as individuals, are entirely ignored. 
They die in oblivion. I do not believe there is 
a commercial nurseryman in America to-day 
who seeks out these trees and plants and makes 
a special feature of propagating from them. 
We admit there are some seedsmen who have 
practiced selection until they have acquired a 
world-wide reputation for their skill in improv- 
ing known varieties. In the case of trees I 
believe it is a universal rule of nurserymen to 
take scions from nursery rows or any tree most 
convenient of the variety desired. Downing 
points out clearly that a graft from a diseased 
or weak tree will transmit the disease or weak- 
ness to the healthy stock, even if grafted a 
dozen times in quick succession. I believe 
this has more to do with the failure of orchards 
than any other cause. The truth is, the nur- 
sery business has degenerated into a mere 
speculation; the winning man being the one 
who can sell stock the cheapest. Year after 
year the strawberry grower goes into his fruit- 
ing beds and digs up plants between the rows 
where they have stood unprotected, freezing, 
thawing and heaving, under water or dried by 
the winds of winter until their constitutional 
vigor is utterly destroyed. 
What is the Kesnlt.' Go into the field at 
harvest time; the first few feet of a row is 
loaded with fine fruit, the next has scarcely 
any, and then follows a vacancy where the 
plants have not vitality enough left to grow, 
and so on through the whole field, the soil, 
fertility and cultivation being all the same. 
Why is this? The mother plant from wliich 
the first came was strong and vigorous; in the 
second instance the vitality had been lost, per- 
haps through the process of bud variation or 
reversion, or quite likely the plants had been 
taken from an old exhausted bed where seed- 
lings had come up. I do not know of another 
grower whose plants are not more or less 
mixed with seedlings or spurious plants. No 
attention whatever is paid to selection. 
Bud Variation has become generally recog- 
nized. Many of our most valuable varieties 
are nothing but sports (bud variations). Thus 
the Golden Queen raspberry is a sport of the 
Cuthbert. During the i)a8t season I found in 
the boxes, while marketing, berries partly red 
and partly yellow, the red part being identical 
with Cuthbert. I hope the coming season to 
find the canes on which these berries grew, 
that I may experiment w th them. The Bos- 
ton nectarine is conceded to be a sport from 
the peach. The cases are numerous and I 
need not dwell on them. 
The clamor is heard from one end of the 
country to the other for something that will 
equal the old Wilson's Albany of 30 years ago. 
Where the Wilson Has Been Kept Pure by 
careful selection it has no equal among the 
perfect flowering sorts of to-day. I have 
nothing on my farm that will approach it, and 
I have tried pretty much everything ofl'ered. 
Wherever the Wilson has failed, you will find 
on careful investigation that no effort has been 
made to preserve its purity. I speak of it as a 
perfect flowering variety. I admit the Cres- 
cent is more vigorous and more productive, but 
like the Wilson and for the same reason has 
been given a back seat by many growers. As 
a cash bag filler these two are yet the cham- 
pion.s. They have made more money for the 
grower than all other varieties put together, 
where they have been kept pure by proper 
selection. 
A pedigree plant may be said to be one 
which possesses the best points of its variety 
in the greatest perfection, with ability to trans- 
mit these characteristics to its offspring. The 
want of fixedness of the desirable features in 
our new varieties is the cause of failure when 
they pass out of the hands of the originators. 
Their changed conditions and different meth- 
ods of cultivation render the bud variation so 
great thai for the want of proper selection and 
exclusion of inferior plants their value is lost- 
