32 
THE COTTAGE GARDENER AND COUNTRY GENTLEMAN, Octobee 19, 1858. 
fruit trees, however, are neglected for one year, it may 
take years to get them on the right track again. Flower¬ 
beds may be grassed over for a time; but nothing about 
a place suffers so much as the lawn, if it is not regularly 
mowed. Therefore, to reduce the labour of a garden for 
one season is certainly not economy, if economy means 
good management, as Cobbett used to say. 
The Marquis of Breadalbane is well aware of all that, 
and Mr. Kidd, his head manager here, is of the same 
opinion, and the place is kept up as it should be. The 
crops of fruit and vegetables here this season were 
enormous. Wo have had the benefit of Mr. Kidds 
system of managing young trees in general, and I shall 
only allude more particularly to his wall and stone fruit 
trees. 
The true theory of managing fruit trees, till they are of 
age to bear fruit, is not to be found in any book on fruit 
trees in the English language. The nursery management 
of fruit trees, and more especially of stone fruit trees and 
all trained trees, is on a wrong principle, because it is the 
only system that will pay. If people must have trees so 
and so, then there is no room for such and such trees. 
But the true and best way of dealing with such trees was 
detailed from practice, in Loudon’s Gardener's Magazine, 
more than thirty years back, and it is now practised by a 
large number of our best gardeners, amongst whom Mr. 
Kidd is one of its greatest advocates. 
Their system, which I myself have adopted, for more 
than twenty years, is thisFrom the day you bud aPeaeh, 
or graft an Apple, a knife must not touch the tree till the 
first winter after if has borne fruit. “ Keep the knife 
from them till they begin to bear” is the motto,—all the 
pruning they need should be done with the finger and 
thumb. But is there not something left out when they 
say, touch it not with the knife after it is budded or 
grafted P Is the stock allowed to grow with the graft or 
bud P Surely not. Well, can you cut off the head of 
the stock, or snag it back behind the bud with the finger 
and thumb ? No, not very likely ; but all that is under¬ 
stood. Here is exactly the point where we great gar¬ 
deners are as wrong as those who cut and come again to 
the fruit quarters. We know all the little necessaries, 
and they are “understood” amongst ourselves; but we 
do wrong in supposing that they are generally under¬ 
stood, as must be the case, when we say, “ touch not the 
tree with the knife till after it has borne fruit.” When 
the stock is part of the tree, and the head of it, it must 
be cut after the bud has taken; but after that, touch not 
till after fruit comes. 
The way is this. The bud of a budded Peach, Nec¬ 
tarine, Apricot, Plum, or Cherry, starts, or begins to 
grow, in May. If the plant is to be a standard from a 
low bud, or budding, all the side-shoots it will make the 
first year must be stopped at the first joint,—that is, just 
beyond the first joint; and, if that joint starts, stop it 
after the same system to the end of the season, and also 
to the length of the stem of the standard afterwards, if 
the growth does not make standard height the first 
season. 
The next is to be a low, bushy tree, the shoots begin¬ 
ning near the ground. These are called dwarfs in the 
trade, and dwarfs should have five stems to begin with, 
■—or three stems, if five cannot be got,—the first year. 
When the graft, or bud, has grown ten inches long, or 
a few inches more or less, according to some kinds, the 
top bud is broken off, and that compels all the eyes to 
break, or push into shoots immediately,—that time of 
stopping the leading bud being the height of the growing 
season. If there are more than five starts, or shoots, 
they must be reduced to that number, by displacing the 
other young shoots in such a way as will leave the five 
as nearly in a circle as possible. The foundation of 
dwarfs is thus laid, without a cut, by Midsummer of the 
first year. The five shoots are sure and certain not to be 
exactly of the same strength ; and, when the strongest of 
them reaches two feet from the bottom, it must be stopped, 
—say, early in August; and from this stop three shoots 
ought to be had ; then there would be eight shoots ; but 
five shoots would be better the first year. Therefore, two 
out of the three starts should be stopped, a few buds 
from the start. If two of the five shoots are much 
stronger than the rest, stop two instead of one. At the 
end of the first growing-season a dwarf is complete in 
itself, and ready to be planted, or transplanted, for good. 
It has five vigorous shoots nearly of the same strength ; 
and, if it is not sold, the five shoots must be cut back, to 
keep the tree within bounds in the nursery. But, if it is 
sold, the five shoots must not. or should not, be cut back 
on any account whatever; they should only have from 
six inches to ten inches of the points cut off; and, if more 
than two shoots start from the cut ends, they are to be 
stopped when they are a few inches long. But two shoots 
are to be allowed- to grow their full length, to make ten 
principal limbs to the dwarf tree. 
When the tree is to be a trained one, the top bud is 
also to be stopped when it is ten inches long ; and five of 
the best shoots from the break, or next growth, are to be 
selected for their best positions for making a regular fan¬ 
like shape ; and, if any of these five shoots is stronger than 
the rest, it is trained lower down than its right position, 
in order to check it, instead of stopping it, as for dwarf, 
bush-like trees. Then, by the end of the first growing- 
season, a maiden Beach, Nectarine, or Apricot, has a 
framework of five principal shoots ; and none of them are 
to be cut more than six or nine inches back ; and seven 
or nine shoots are to be the complement the second year. 
This natural system does away altogether with the most 
objectionable practice of cutting back maiden trees at 
the end of the first growing season. The stock on which 
the tree is worked does not get stinted, or bark-bound, 
as it does, in nine cases out of ten, from the sudden check 
of cutting off the whole head to a few inches. There are 
no large wounds to heal over, and to leave a dead surface, 
under the new wood, to canker, to gum, and ultimately 
to extend its baneful influence to the destruction of whole 
limbs. Such is the system which Mr. Kidd approves 
of and practises ; and, if success depends on the weight of 
crops, and on the health and medium-size of the wood, 
no one has more reason to be satisfied than he and his 
employers. 
His plan of growing Tomatoes on the open border has 
extended far and wide round London, and reduced their 
value in our home market just one half. At first the 
market-gardeners of London would not believe my re¬ 
port, and some of the best of the gardeners came dowm 
to my house to see that it was all right. Mr. Forsyth, 
from G-unnersbury Park, is the best known of those who 
made sure of the point; and Mr. Watson, market-gar¬ 
dener, of Ealing, came over last May, and took away lots 
of the seedlings from Mr. Kidd, probably because he 
believed the kind was more hardy than his own. He did 
not tell us how they turned out; but he spoke of planting 
an acre or so of them for Covent Garden. But this season 
Mr. Kidd had all his Tomatoes out in the quarters of the 
kitchen garden, and he ripened loads of them. I never 
saw such a sight, or believed the thing possible ; but they 
sent me a large basketful of the very finest ripe Tomatoes 
from the wall border of the Experimental Garden. The 
border had an eastern aspect, and the plants were not 
near the wall. The way Mr. Kidd had them was on 
ridges, sloped to the south, at an angle of 45°. Three such 
ridges were as long as his wall border of 400 feet. He 
takes a crop of winter Lettuce, and another crop of early 
Potatoes, from the same ridges, before planting the 
Tomatoes ; and he can send full-ripe Tomatoes to Teign- 
mouth Castle, the Highland residence of the Marquis of 
Breadalbane, 500 miles carriage, without losing a “ fruit;” 
and, of course, he must be a first-rate fruit-packer, and so 
he ought, for he has had more than twenty years’ prac¬ 
tice of packing all the best kinds of fruit for long distances. 
