190 
THE FLORIST AND POMOLOGIST. 
[Dkcembf-h, 
way, a gradual improvement would be effected 
in yield, quality of fruit, vigour, and produc¬ 
tiveness. Not less important is it that scions 
for grafting should be taken from healthful 
trees that have proved themselves good bearers 
of handsome high-flavoured fruit. If the 
nursery practice of taking scions from young 
trees is continued for fifty years, twenty 
generations will succeed each other not one 
of which ever produced a blossom. Surely at 
the end of that period they will forget what 
they were made for. Their fruit functions 
will be weakened, and ultimately eliminated 
for want of exercise. An eminent scientist 
who gave more thought to this subject than 
any one before or since, has said that if a 
man should tie his right hand up in a sling 
and never use it, and his descendants should 
all do the same, that member would perish, 
and ^his progeny would in the course of time 
be born without right arms. —Hugh T. Brooks, 
Pearl Creek, in Proceedings of Western New 
York Horticultural Society (p. 55). 
CAPPJCIOUSNESS OF THE FKUIT 
CPtOPS OF 1884. 
I though general failure is the true 
nln' estimate of the Fruit Crops of the 
season, there are fortunately many 
^ exceptions to confirm the rule of ruin. 
Never perhaps was there a finer promise, 
seldom if ever a more general havoc and 
failure. Yet immediately after the severe 
frosts—during the blooming season amounting 
in many districts to from fifteen to twenty 
degrees—it was seen that while the Ypricots 
were mostly taken. Peaches and Nectarines 
were spared or left. And even the Apricots 
escaped in some gardens, and good crops 
have been harvested in prime condition in not 
a few places. 
Next to the Apricots the Plums suffered 
the most. The trees, white as sheets, w^ere 
blackened in a night, and all the fair pro¬ 
spects of a Plum season totally destroyed. 
And yet here and there—cases are rare, still 
they exist, and a notable example has recently 
come under my notice—there is a fair crop 
of Plums of all sorts, including Gages, which 
suffered the most by the stinging April frosts. 
More curious still, in a row of a dozen 
pyramidal Victorias eleven are fruitless, and 
one only had a good half crop. In a row of 
Pond’s Seedling, all are fruitless but three. 
Gages are nil, with the exception of a 
Guthrie’s Late Green on a wall. Of three 
Golden Drops on the same wall, two are 
almost bare, while the third is fairly hung 
with fruit. 
Equally surprising differences may be 
noticed among Pears. To begin with the 
bloom ; this was of very variable and highly 
varying quantity. Mostly under average, it 
sank from this to the smallest proportions, 
and in one instance to nil —in a garden of 
four or more acres, well furnished with pears 
alike on and off the walls. 
Apples bloomed late and well a full month 
or more after the stinging frosts, and almost 
every one counted on a full crop to partially 
recoup cultivators for the failure of other crops. 
But the crop set as a rule badly, and over large 
districts not at all, so that there is a grievous 
and general failure of the most useful crop of 
the year. Besides, in not a few gardens, hardly 
had the apple crop set till it hastened to drop, 
and it has gone on dropping prematurely all 
through the summer. And yet in other places, 
and we are amongst them, there is a full half 
crop of Apples, and though rather smaller 
than usual, the quality promises to be good. 
Here and there, too, one comes upon gardens 
and orchards full of fruit. 
The severe frosts in April hit the Goose¬ 
berries and Currants in a most critical condi¬ 
tion, and almost every one thought that these 
were ruined; they were, however, little or 
none the worse, unless just on the crowns of 
the bushes, and the general verdict is a full 
crop of bush fruit, and of excellent quality. 
Kaspberries also showed, and began to 
swell an abnormally large crop; and had this 
not been seriously reduced in size by the 
severe and long-continued drought, the crop 
would have reached to an unprecedentedly 
heavy gross weight. 
Strawberries as a rule were plentiful and 
good, the season being, however, seriously 
shortened by the heat and the drought. Here 
and there, however, the crop was also consider¬ 
ably crippled by the frost, and the yield was 
much under average. 
Some of these variable results may be 
explained by reference to .soils, sub-soils. 
