40 
House & Garden 
DWARF FRUITS FOR THE SMALL PLACE 
Growing Apples, Pears and Plums Where the Space Is Small and the Desire 
Great—A Solution of a Frequent Garden Problem 
T HE fruit - growing 
ambition of the own¬ 
er of a small lawn or 
yard does not often reach 
further than cultivating 
a few berry bushes. The 
four walls or fences sur¬ 
rounding his domain are 
too frequently left bare 
when they might be made 
useful and beautiful, 
turned into hedges 
weighed down with the 
larger kinds of fruit. It 
does not require great 
capital to do this—only 
a small financial outlay 
and a fair stock of 
patience. 
Dwarf fruit grown 
espalier fashion—or, as 
we more generally call it, 
wall grown fruit—is not 
a recent fad. Indeed, it 
is one of the oldest meth¬ 
ods of cultivation. The 
Italians were the first to 
discover it, then the 
Swiss and French, and 
lastly the English. Amer¬ 
icans have been rather 
slow to take it up be¬ 
cause, I suppose, econo¬ 
my of space has been rel¬ 
atively unimportant with 
us; we have been content 
to accept from several trees the yield a Euro¬ 
pean would expect from a fraction of the space 
they occupy. These dwarf fruits are far from 
being for the rich man's grounds alone. They 
should appeal particularly to the small house¬ 
holder and to all who seek to decrease the high 
cost of living by using every available bit of 
space for cultivation. 
For a Hedge 
Dwarf apple and pear trees can be planted 
a few feet apart so as to form a continuous 
hedge. In the spring the branches of a well 
cared for hedge of this sort are crowded with 
blossoms that are a mass of beauty in them¬ 
selves. Later the fruit comes, a great burden 
of it that is all the heavier because the strength 
of the little trees is directed toward bearing 
rather than making a large wood growth. 
Every fruit will ripen as it should because it is 
directly exposed to the sun’s rays, and it can 
be easily reached when the time comes to pick. 
Still another advantage to be noted is that the 
diminutive height of the trees makes the neces¬ 
sary pruning and spraying operations far easier 
to accomplish than in the case of the standard 
size trees. 
In this country you can buy dwarf stock 
outright, or train it yourself with the advice 
of a nurseryman. An eight-year-old tree, al¬ 
ready trained in the fan, U or horizontal shape, 
and with a good root ball, is to be had for $16 
or so. Dwarf trees not trained in shape for 
wall cultivation are, of course, much lower in 
price. 
There is a great deal of pleasure to be had 
from planting and shaping your pear or apple 
hedge yourself, for the older and better trained 
it is the more valuable it becomes. First of 
all, be sure to have a firm and durable support 
for the wire or trellis on which the trees are 
to be trained, for it must last as long as they 
do. Solid chestnut, cedar or locust posts will 
be entirely satisfactory for most situations. 
Good one-year-old trees from a reliable 
nursery will do, but the best results with ap¬ 
ples are had from those grafted on the roots of 
one of the two sorts of French dwarf stock 
which are imported to this country in a dor¬ 
mant state. These are known as the Paradise 
and Doucin stocks. Of them, the Paradise 
seems the more popular just now. Nearly every 
variety of apple grafted on this stock seems to 
thrive, and give the earliest and heaviest yield. 
Dwarf pears are grafted 
on quince roots, while 
our varieties of plums 
and cherries are grafted 
to dwarf European roots. 
Early bearing, by the 
way, is one of the ad¬ 
vantages of the dwarf 
tree which will appeal to 
the owner of a new coun¬ 
try place. The Alexan¬ 
der apple, for instance, 
often bears the second 
year when grown as a 
dwarf, while you must 
wait six years for the 
standard tree to give ap¬ 
preciable results. 
Training the Tree 
After selection and 
planting, the next con¬ 
sideration is training the 
shoots. They must be 
gently bent and tied into 
position as soon as they 
develop. If a brick wall 
or the side of a garage 
or other building is used, 
wires must be strung at 
regular intervals in either 
the fan, the horizontal or 
the U shape—whichever 
you decide upon. The 
branches are bent and 
tied to these a foot apart 
until perfect symmetry of design is obtained. 
All superfluous growth is rigorously pruned 
away, and the roots cut so that they form a 
ball, with no long leaders or tap-roots. The 
result is that all the strength of the tree is 
concentrated in the few branches which are 
allowed to grow. 
When a brick wall or the side of a building 
is used, the tree should not be started as close 
to it as in the case of the detached trellis. 
Where the horizontal style of cultivation is 
adopted, as in the upper photograph on this 
page, as many strands of wire a foot apart are 
used as will fill the space and support the 
branches evenly. These branches should ulti¬ 
mately be of equal length and begin at the 
same level on the right and left sides of the 
trunk. 
Different Shapes 
The fan-shaped arrangement starts close to 
the beginning of the root graft and radiates 
outward and upward like a fan, while the 
U-shaped tree is composed of four long shoots 
bent outward near the bottom of the trunk and 
then upward to the top of the wall or trellis. 
An attractive apple, pear or cherry hedge 
may be formed of dwarf trees set two feet 
apart and trained to single upright main stems, 
d he effect of these trees along the sides of a 
walk is very beautiful, and their branches will 
be literally loaded with fruit. 
If your trees show too much tendency to run 
to wood growth, they may be taken up and 
(Continued on page 66) 
The espalier grown 
fruit tree must 
have a trellis to 
which its branches 
can be tied. Above 
is a dwarf trained 
horizontally 
A fan-shaped pear 
growing close to a 
wall against which 
it is decorative 
and productive of 
an abundance of 
high quality fruit 
