30 
THE APPLE. 
anc8. Training is often condemned as an unnatural proceeding, and 
so it is. But so likewise are most of the cultivator’s aims and con¬ 
ditions. Primarily, we may be said to train for two purposes—to 
save time and economise space. These two are, perhaps, the most 
important factors of profitable culture. All things are possible to time 
and space, worked with diligence and skill. Nature’s mills, like those of 
the gods, grind slowly : they also grind small. A slow rate of speed and 
small or doubtful results at the end thereof means poverty or ruin to 
cultivators. Hence the immense importance of training as a time saver. 
The skilful trainer takes growth, as it were, in its raw and half-formed 
state, and moulds it into usefulness. He is a utilitarian philosopher 
in theory and practice from the first. True, he may try and likewise 
succeed in gilding utility with beauty; but, however much he may affect 
beauty of form, his main object in training the apple and all other fruit 
trees is profit. The skilful trainer arranges more fruit-bearing wood into 
a given area than the unskilful. The object of all good training is con¬ 
servative and constructive, not destructive. Those who train least often 
prune most, and this of necessity. Once allow the production of useless 
wood or branches in the wrong place, and they must of necessity be 
destroyed to get the right material posted in the right place. Skilful 
training will almost supersede pruning. Here we have placed training 
first, to give practical emphasis to this lesson. Much of our prunings 
are simply the outgrowth of our neglect of or mistakes in training. For 
not only can the form of growth be changed by training, but its character. 
We can train for timber ; we can also train for fruit. Even the mere 
position of a branch may cover the whole difference between the one and 
the other. It may seem a small matter whether a tree shall grow erect or 
horizontally, or whether it s^iall droop or weep from the horizontal line. 
And yet, on such alterations of the main positions of the growth of its 
shoots may hang all the difference between sterility and fertility. The 
natural bent of all young apples is enlargement. Hence most of the 
shoots are sent straight up as high as possible into the air. Those who 
break and start on other lines turn up as soon as they are fairly free of 
the parent stem or branch. The majority of buds point at a more or 
less acute angle skywards. Besides, only the upper buds on most shoots 
break into fresh shoots the following year. All this is in harmony with 
Nature’s ordinance, that the tree was formed to mount as fast and as 
far into the air as possible. The result is height at the expense of 
symmetry and compactness. In giving free room to this natural ten¬ 
dency time and profit are both sacrificed, and form also. Fig. 11 is a 
fair illustration of this natural tendency. If left as shown, only the top 
buds would break the following season, and all the others would re- 
