86 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
LANDSCAPE GARDENING. 
LETTER NINE. 
Dear Sir, —In my last letter I led you through the pinery and 
grapery; I must now drag you through the peach-house into the open 
air. The peachery has the same form, and is of the same dimensions, 
as the pinery. The flues are built and conducted in a similar manner ; 
and the means of admitting fresh air by the front lights sliding in 
grooves, and the upper lights of the roof moveable by lines and pullies, 
are also on the same construction. 
The back wall is covered with a light trellis, leaning back over the 
flue, and covered with rider peach and nectarine trees from end to end; 
none of their branches being trained downwards lower than about four 
feet from the ground; because if lower than this neither the shoots nor 
fruit ripen kindly, in consequence of their distance from the glass and 
want of sufficient air; besides being too much shaded by the row of 
standard trees which occupy the middle of the house. 
The trees on the trellis are trained in the usual manner. The prin¬ 
cipal branches being laid out divergingly, like the ribs of a lady’s fan, 
' and the bearing shoots are laid in the intermediate spaces. The great 
art of pruning a peach-tree in such a situation is, to keep up a continual 
series of young shoots, rising from as near to the summit of the stem as 
possible, to be led outwards to succeed the older branches, which may 
require to be cut out. This principle constantly acted on renders a 
peach-tree a perfect proteus, because it cannot remain for two years 
together exactly of the same form, or containing the same number of 
parts. The constitutional habit and manner of bearing of the tree 
renders this constant selection of its last produced shoots necessary, 
because on these only the flowers and fruit are borne. 
On a well managed peach-tree, the shoots formed in the preceding 
summer are regularly dispersed over its whole expanse, and this is 
accomplished not so much by a judicious pruning in the winter, as by 
a proper selection of the rightly-placed buds and shoots soon after the 
commencement of the summer growth. At that season every healthy 
bud on the tree begins to move; if all were permitted to remain, the 
powers of the tree would be very unequally distributed. Some of the 
shoots would be misplaced or too strong, and the greater number would 
be too weak and unfit to bear a crop in the following year. But to 
prevent all such irregularity the gardener pays constant attention to 
direct the growth in its first stage; he selects only a certain number of 
