A PRACTICAL ILLUSTRATION. 
55 
this pruning of the roots, but this of course refers only to trees that 
produce wood in excess, and which, the too free application of the 
knife but too often promotes; to retard that growth, recourse should 
be had to root pruning, which I thus apply. A bar of iron five feet 
long, one inch and a half wide by one inch thick is thus formed, 
(Fi g. 5, a) nine inches wide at the bottom, steeled and hardened to 
5 
a chisel edge; with a common woodman’s beetle this is driven 
through the roots at from two to three feet from the stem of the tree, 
and at an angle of about forty-five degrees, ( b ) each insertion of the 
pruner following closely the last insertion until the circle, if a stand¬ 
ard, or the semi-circle of a wall-tree be completed, the roots thus se¬ 
vered will produce radicals in abundance, and fruit-bearing wood 
will be induced in the room of barren and unproductive leaders. The 
strawberry plants, which are for the most part Wilmots, Kearns, and 
the Downton sorts, were, in 1831, planted at half a yard apart; from 
these the runners of this year (not severed) were placed in the inter¬ 
mediate spaces, and the old roots' dug up, whose places will be sup¬ 
plied by the runners of the next year, and thus as it were almost 
imperceptibly the renewal of the plants will be going on continually 
on the same site. But these are points of minor consideration, when 
compared with that of converting an intolerable nuisance into a 
source of profit, a nuisance so general as to pervade almost every 
man’s dwelling place, particularly in the country town. The abomi¬ 
nable stench arising from the filth and foul water of the wash-house, 
the scullery, and the privy, when in a state of stagnation ; these, as 
I have before stated, in our case, originally flowed into a cess-pit in 
