370 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
[ October 26, 1893. 
planet of ours. An 11 stone man is 8 stones water ; a Chrysanthe¬ 
mum is rather more watery still, a Potato is 75 per cent, water, a 
Turnip is nearer 90 per cent. Is it not surprising what water can 
do—whether with whiskey or without it? I think it was Dr. 
Frankland who took the trouble to analyse a jelly fish in an oven. 
It weighed 6 lbs. to begin with, and when all the water was 
gone there was just 16 grains of something left. This water is 
not usually considered a sensient thing, but it gets very near it. 
That 16 grains of something, phosphorus and sulphur and carbon 
a ad some other elements, had managed, somehow, to make more 
than half a gallon of water sensient for the time being. A tree is 
from 30 to 40 per cent, water at full growth. When you get a 
10 oz. Chrysanthemum you will find nearly 9 ozs. of it water. 
When you have reduced your plant to ash you have dispersed 
its water ; some carbonic acid, a little sulphur has perhaps been 
sublimed, but these are of no importance to the analyst. The 
future plant can get those items from the atmosphere. What is 
left is the potash, soda, iron, magnesia, and lime, phosphates, 
sulphates, and nitrates, and it is these you have to add as manure 
in the same proportions as you find them in the ash. If the ash 
contains 9 parts potash to 3 parts soda you gain nothing (but the 
loss of the soda) by adding more than 3 parts. The coming plant 
cannot take up more than 3 parts of soda to every 9 parts of 
potash it can find. If you forget to put the 9 parts of potash in, 
and there happens to be none in the soil, you cannot get the plant 
at all, no more than you can build without building materials. It 
is the same with all the other constituents. They will make a 
plant in the proportion specified, and no other. If suppose of 
seven of the constituents you give enough for a thousand blooms, 
and of the eighth only enough for one, you will only get one. The 
other constituents are idle, waiting for their absent comrade ; they 
can do nothing without him. It is not at all surprising ; it cannot 
be otherwise. 
It would be useless to tell you how to ascertain what amount 
of each chemical there is in the ash. It would take hours to do 
that, and it would not interest you. If you wish to learn how to 
do it obtain some text book on chemistry, and plod away at it till 
you master the subject. There is no royal road to chemistry. 
Hard study and long practice is the only way, and you will find 
disappointment thicker than you ever found Blackberries. The 
facility with which you can make a mistake is surprising. 
On the suitability of a soil for Chrysanthemums I had better 
not enter. If you do not know more than I do on that subject 
you will find I should say breaking stones as an industry consider¬ 
ably the better of the two occupations. As a manure for Chrys¬ 
anthemums I should say phosphate of soda and saltpetre (with a 
little sulphate of iron in it if you want colour) is as useful as 
anything, but I am rather inclined to think horse manure is good. 
In conclusion let me say this. If the love of flowers and the 
love of Nature in her beauty be not worthy of man, then flowers 
were not worthy of creation. If the gratification of the human 
eye, on which Nature has expended so much ingenuity and 
furnishes with such complex and marvellous machinery for the 
detection of beauty be not thought worthy of study, then Nature 
herself has been and still is working on the wrong lines. 
If our sense of the beautiful is not to be gratified why have we 
such a sense within us ? The lover of flowers is usually a kindly 
man, a man with a good, sound, reasonable sort of a soul in him, 
he cannot well be wholly base and vile. In his leisure hours his 
plot of land would not entice him away from plotting evil against 
his fellows. Amid his flowers, emblems of innocence and purity, 
he cannot be altogether unmindful and unthoughtful of the lessons 
and sermons they hourly preach. They must appeal to some 
cognate, moral beauty of character, concealed somewhere within 
him. The orderly and symmetrical development of bud and 
petal must convey some lesson to heart and brain, and in some 
sense sways his steps through life. Love of Nature argues at 
least one soft and tender spot in the human heart, the sordid and 
mean have not absorbed all its facultie s, or closed mental eyes to 
all that is sweet and pure. His thoughts must, at times, rise above 
and soar away from the dissonant clash of contending interest, and 
now and then, at the least, lift him from the contemplation of his 
flowers to that of the Great Flower Grower, the Original Gardener, 
the source and fountain of their being, and of ours and our 
respective places and duties in the drama of life, and to the still 
greater question, as to whether we fill our part half so well as they 
fill theirs. 
THE TREATMENT OF OVERCROPPED FRUIT 
TREES. 
If people would follow the commendable practice of pruning 
every year, be it ever so little, we should not see orchard and 
garden trees, as we do this year, subjected to the bearing of 
weights in excess of their strength and crushed under a pre¬ 
posterous mass of fruit, which by its very superabundance loses 
both in appearance and in quality. The trees thus maltreated 
cannot fail to exhibit symptoms of it for many a day in their 
health as well as in the matter of their product. There is, how¬ 
ever, an antidote for every ill, a recuperative for all exhaustion. 
On this occasion, therefore, it becomes us to resolve and act 
promptly. We accordingly prescribe a combined treatment con¬ 
sisting of pruning, dressing, and feeding. 
Pruning. —In September or October, before the fall of the 
leaf, administer a severe but judicious pruning to the branches and 
boughs which have borne an excessive amount of fruit. If the 
pruning is too short it will have the effect of dangerously mutilating 
the old wood and depriving the head of the tree of the sap 
furnished by the last shoots. If, on the contrary, it is too long, it 
will be inefficacious. The happy medium can be estimated according 
to the age and vigour of the tree, a young and vigorous tree being 
able to bear more drastic treatment, though we may remark that it 
is not common to meet with an excess of production under such 
circumstances. For the rejuvenating or renewing of the crown it 
will be sufficient to preserve in the frame-work of the tree its 
pyramidal, spherical, or diffused aspect following its first direction 
should this be considered desirable. The main branches should be 
taken off with the saw,pared smooth, trimmed,and daubed with clay. 
The pruning-knife or caterpillar-cleaner will do to clear off the 
flower-bearing shoots, spurs, and other elements of fructification. 
Here the more crowded ramifications should be relieved with 
the pruning-knife ; elsewhere they should be shortened upon a 
live bud, while none need be lopped off unless they be completely 
worthless. It would be a wise precaution also to look over the 
shoots of the year which might spring up from the midst of the 
general lassitude, pruning the longer but leaving untouched those 
shorter ones which are likely to be the first to vegetate. 
The Apricot, the Plum, and the Pear are the fruit trees which 
present the most striking examples of over-production. In the 
case of the Cherry the traces are not so marked. Its fruit, though 
plentiful, was not so excessive as to seriously exhaust the tree, and 
the two or three months of summer remaining sufficed for its 
recuperation before the winter time. The Apricot easily develops 
buds on the old wood, but this is no reason for mutilating the 
large branches too low down, as the new shoots would appear in an 
irregular manner, and might be killed in their first season by gum 
or by heat. 
This pruning of the principal organs of the head ought to be 
done above a certain number of wood or fruit branches. The 
former of these should be shortened on the shoots, and the latter 
on the living bud. It is almost only in the region of Southern 
France that we can safely allow a more energetic yield of the 
Apricot, the Almond, and the Peach, in the open air. We are 
speaking especially of the out-of-doors tree trained as standard, 
half-standard, and dwarf. The Plum will keep the most of its 
fruiting shoots, whether pruned or unpruned ; but it should not 
be forgotten in diminishing and reducing the substance of its frame¬ 
work in length that the latent buds are less numerous upon this sort 
of fruit tree. The Plum presents an advantage which we also find in 
the Pear and the Apple, namely, the grafting of the main branches 
which may have been injured by accident. For the Plum we advise 
cleft grafting in autumn before the stagnation of the sap. This 
will give an opportunity of modifying the variety of the tree by 
the grafting of a more agreeable sort (of scion). If the graft 
should fail it can be repeated in spring time either in the cleft or 
at the crown. The pruning of the original branch work will then 
be deferred until the rising of the sap, and practised gradually 
as the grafts develop. Pippin fruits, such as Apples and Pears, 
should be severely pruned, always in the autumn. 
Dressing. —This consists in cleaning with a brush and washing 
