Fruit-growing in Kent. 
95 
bushes, raspberry canes, and strawberry plants, which pay well, 
especially the last named, as the distance from London is short, 
and the fruit can therefore be sent in fresh and early to the 
markets. 
In the Weald of Kent also, where apples alone were grown 
until quite recently, black currants, gooseberries, and plums 
have been, and are now being, planted to some extent. Fruit 
of various kinds is also cultivated throughout the country by 
persons who have a few acres planted with fruit-trees, and who 
arc, as a rule, a most industrious and prosperous class ; as well 
as by cottagers in their gardens. In good seasons a few apple 
or plum trees, or some rows of gooseberry or currant bushes, 
help materially to pay their rent. A garden of this kind, well 
stocked with fruit-trees, has often been the means of giving an 
industrious labourer a rise in position. 
Fruit is grown mainly in three particular districts of the county, 
situated in East, Mid, and West Kent, whose respective areas are 
determined in a degree by geological conditions. In the first- 
named district fruit is cultivated in the parishes lying between 
Boughton-under-Blean, to the west of the city of Canterbury, 
and Rainham, a few miles east of the city of Rochester. Lam- 
barde has it that there were thirty fruit-growing parishes here, 
but there are hardly so many in these days. Cherries are 
grown here in large quantities ; in fact, this is the cherry-garden 
of England par excellence, though other fruits are grown and 
the acreage of mixed plantations is constantly being increased. 
The soils upon which the greater part of the fruit is grown in this 
part of East Kent are clays and loamy clays of the Thanet beds ; 
the " plastic clays " of the Woolwich and Reading beds, and of 
the Oldhaven beds, as at Selling.* These all crop up variously 
in this locality, and overhang the chalk, whose hills form the 
range known as the " back-bone of Kent," stretching through 
the whole upper part of East Kent, through North and West 
Kent. There is an almost continuous stratum of the Thanet 
beds above the chalk from Rainham to Sittingbourne upon 
which the fruit is principally grown. Between Sittingbourne 
and Boughton Blean, the limit of the fruit-growing line, the 
Woolwich beds — the middle division of the Lower London 
Tertiaries — appear in alternation with the lower series of Thanet 
beds.f To these formations the upper parts of East Kent owe 
their fertility. Upon these most of the orchards, plantations, 
and hop-grounds are situated. A small proportion only is placed 
directly on the mere surface-marls of the chalk. 
In Mid Kent the fruit plantations are upon the Hythe beds of 
* ' Memoirs of Geological Survey,' vol. iv. p. 76. 
t Ibid., p. 98. 
