June 13,1S95. 
JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. 
521 
one’s easy chair, but before doing so in print it is as well to examine 
the signature of the writer lest one should haply “ catch a Tartar.” 
Well, having read the remarks of Mr. Molyneux on page 475 I said to 
myself, I cannot let this pass without notice. Here is Mr. Molyneux, 
a man known by repute to all the horticultural world, telling the public 
through the medium of your well-known Journal that, practically 
speaking, it matters not what kind of stock is used for the Apple, as the 
cultivator can get equally good results from Paradise, free stocks, or 
Crab. I have not quoted his words, but I take this to be the sense of 
his remarks. If I have rightly understood him I must say that he ta’xes 
a view which is diametrically opposed to all the experience which I 
have had and that of most cultivators, and at the risk of “ catching a 
Tartar ” I must beg leave to differ with him. 
That Mr. Molyneux personally is able to obtain equally good results 
from Apples on all the three stocks mentioned I do not for a moment 
that had the trees been carefully root-pruned at the time they were 
closely head-pruned, things would have been different. ■ But then the 
general public does not know all this. Root-pruning is to many an 
unknown science, and I maintain very properly so, as it is a surgical 
operation to be taken in hand advisedly by the skilled gardener when 
his trees are worked on unsuitable stocks, but otherwise seldom needed, 
and far best left alone. 
Now theory is one thing, practice is another; and again there are 
various kinds of practice. Mr. Molyneux is a skilled cultivator, mixes 
with other skilled cultivators, and has possibly instructed some of his 
less gifted neighbours. I, on the other hand, come in contact in the 
course of business with a very large number of less skilful gardeners,, 
working men, allotment holders, and amateurs, and during the planting 
season it is a matter of daily occurrence for people to come and say “ I 
want some pyramid Apples on your Paradise stock to plant in place of 
doubt, but because he is able to do so it by no means follows that every¬ 
one else can do the same. 
Speaking of “ garden trees,” let us begin with the pyramid, which is 
the most ordinary form of culture for a garden. I admit that on poor 
gravel or sand, which is hardly 6t for fruit culture at all, and which 
demands a genius to obtain anything like a satisfactory result, the Crab 
and free stocks have their advantages, tut for anything like good soil 
there is not the least comparison between these and the Paradise. The 
ordinary cultivator of pyramid trees in a garden has only one failing, 
but it is a serious one. He prunes his trees too closely, with the result 
that they are filled with wood ; thickets into which one could not thrust 
one’s hand to take a blackbird’s nest; and fruit is unknown, at any rate 
for some years, and then only on the outside of the tree where the wood 
has been able to ripen. The reason that he feels bound to adopt this 
rigorous method of pruning is that his trees, grafted on the Crab or free 
stock, will make so much growth, whereas had they been on the Paradise 
they would have made far less growth and far more fruit spurs. Of 
course I well know that the luxuriant growth was probably helped by 
over-kindness on the part of the cultivator, who manured his young 
trees as freely as though they had been in full bearing ; and I also know 
my pyramids on Crab stocks, which seldom or never fruit, and which I 
am going to dig up.” So true is this that, setting aside orders received 
from market growers, I should say fully half the retail orders we have 
are for this purpose. Again, it is not only amateurs that have made the 
discovery that Apples fruit more freely on the Paradise than on the free 
stock, or why are market growers planting trees on the Paradise by the 
thousand 
Of course I do not say that early and continuous bearing are the 
only merits of Apple trees worked on the Paradise. One must also bear 
in mind the fact that the fruit they bear ripens at least a week or ten 
days earlier, at any rate in the Midlands, which in a cold climate is no 
small advantage ; and further, it is much more brilliant in colour, and 
far superior in point of flavour. To reduce this to hard fact ^ market 
grower in Lincolnshire told me last autumn that he had planted a field 
of pyramid Apples, part on the Crab stock and part on the Par^.^^^e, and 
that not only did the latter bear much more fruit, but that it manj 30 per 
cent, more money in the market, and he was seriously contemplating 
the advisability of digging up his 12 acres of trees on the Crab (just 
coming into bearing) and replanting with trees on the Paradise. 
One more note and I have done. Every gardener remembers with 
