44 
THE FLORIST AND POM.OLOGIST. 
growth, that unless furnished with a sufficient supply of suitable nutriment, 
they must become exhausted and debilitated before the period to which they 
may reasonably be supposed capable of surviving. 
It will not be amiss to take a short review of some of the causes which are 
likely to have an influence on the well-doing of fruit trees under artificial 
treatment, on walls and pyramids for instance, which are both subjected to 
rather a rigorous course of manipulation. In the first place a defective drainage is 
very injurious and must be corrected; and the appearance of the trees will 
always indicate when the drainage is bad by a weakly habit of growth, un¬ 
ripened wood, and the stem and branches much covered with moss and lichens. 
In the next place the character of the subsoil has a very great influence on the 
welfare or otherwise of all fruit trees. There are some which are so inimical, 
either from poverty or a deleterious composition, that the roots will not enter 
into them at all; and on the other hand, there are some which, although differ¬ 
ing materially from the surface soil, do yet contain a good supply of pure nutri¬ 
ment, and if the texture is at all open, the roots will penetrate a long way into 
it in search of fresh food, and that too without any of those bad effects which 
often follow on a poor or deleterious subsoil, such for example as cankered 
wood, and the tips of the young branches dying off, and so forth, symptoms 
quite familiar enough to practical men. 
Now, whether the subsoils are good or bad, there are none so good as to be in¬ 
dependent of assistance, and none so bad but that their effects may be neutralised, 
where the operations are not on a very large scale, say for instance the borders 
of a kitchen garden, by total removal to a certain depth, and the substitution 
of a good compost to increase the depth of the staple soil; but when the sub¬ 
soil is of a good quality and tolerably open in texture, it only needs thorough 
drainage and well breaking up. In either case care should be taken to plant 
shallow, and to trust more to the principle of renovation of the surface soil, 
than to any permanent influence which the subsoils whether good or bad are 
likely to have on the welfare of the trees. At the same time they cannot be 
put altogether on one side, and operations must be carried on with reference to 
their peculiar qualities. I would like to press this point particularly on the 
attention of young practitioners who are likely to be called upon in future years 
to plant fruit trees r on a large scale. It would be useless to go to the expense 
of making large plantations on bad subsoils; it would never pay, and after a 
few years the progress of the trees would be most unsatisfactory. This is 
merely in passing; my remarks are intended to apply more particularly to fruit 
trees grown on a smaller scale, and where space is very valuable, and the 
operator is obliged by the force of circumstances to crop his fruit tree borders, 
and even to run his crops pretty close up to his pyramids, so that the soil is 
not only subjected to the exhaustion caused by feeding the roots of the trees, 
but is also liable to become impoverished by kitchen garden crops. Now it is 
not to be denied that frequent and liberal applications of manure are a very 
great help to these borders, and enable heavy crops to be taken from them, and 
that at the same time the more soluble parts of the manure are carried down by 
the action of water so as to reach and benefit the roots; but even this has its 
limits, and in time such soils, although good, and even rich to all outward • 
appearance, become incapable of throwing up a superior produce, arising 
probably from being overcharged with rich inorganic matter, and a deficiency 
of those elements which are only found in pure maiden soils from open pas¬ 
tures ; and this indicates a necessity for what I call renovation, and it is aston¬ 
ishing to any one who is not conversant with its effects to see what a change 
for the best will be produced by the complete removal of all the surface soil 
down to the roots, and the substitution of a good compost, composed principally 
