2 
a 
breeding experiments are carried out. 
There is no end to the varieties which may 
be produced by crossing different kinds of 
fruits; but one might make a thousand 
crosses without finding any improvement. 
Hence the greatest skill, judgment, and 
knowledge must be brought to bear if any 
remarkable results are to be gained. ‘To 
produce a new fruit which has no parti- 
cular advantage over existing fruits, to 
give it a name of its own, and put it on 
the market, is only to add to the confusion 
of the already over-stocked nurseryman’s 
catalogue. 
Already there are more than five hun- 
dred different standard kinds of apples in 
the English market, and more than eight 
hundred different kinds of pears! 
The greatest triumphs in fruit improve- 
ment have been with peaches and 
nectarines. . Out of about fifty standard 
varieties of peaches now on the market 
thirty were raised at Sawbridgeworth, and 
twenty of the twenty-four standard varie- 
ties of nectarines. Peaches and nectarines, 
being of the same species, cross well to- 
gether. A peach no doubt often improves 
the size of a nectarine, while a nectarine 
flavor often improves a peach. 
The method of crossing two fruits is 
simplicity itself. The horticulturist 
merely takes the pollen from the flower of 
one specimen, and dusts it into the stigma 
of the flower of another specimen. The 
result is a hybrid, for better or for worse. 
Of course the experiment is not made 
quite at haphazard, without a certain 
knowledge of Nature’s mysterious ways 
and laws of production. There is a story 
of a man who thought he would produce 
some marvellous new fruit or flower, he 
dared not think what, by collecting the 
pollen of ais garden flowers, and dusting it 
upon the flowers of his apple tree! But 
there is a limit even to fruit-breeding. 
Supposing that it is desired to cross the 
latest and most luscious peach with the 
most luscious nectarine. 
Two or three of the good shoots will be 
selected for the experiment on the free 
that is to be the seed parent, at the time 
when the bloom buds are beginning to show 
color. 
As scon as the pleats are open, the 
anthers are removed in order that self- 
fertilization may not be effected, and the 
pistils, the female organs of the flower 
which are to be fructified, are left clearly 
exposed. 
The flowers are at once isolated in 
muslin bags, so that no buzzing bee or 
officious insect shall visit them, and per- 
haps anticipate the work that is to be 
done. 
All things thus made ready, the operator 
collects the pollen with a camel’s hair 
brush from the flowers of the other 
parents, and with the merest touch applies 
it to the pistils of the prepared blossoms 
one after the other. 
In course of time the flowers thus 
fertilised bear their fruit. The fruits are 
plucked and the seeds gathered with great 
care, to be sown in the autumn. In the 
_ spring seedlings grow up, and from their 
- 
THE AUSTRALIAN GARDENER.. 
first appearance the closest watch is kept 
on their habits. REPU ety ER Loe eet 
Long before the seedlings grow old 
enough to bear blooms, the trained eye of 
the horticulturist may discover that the 
plants have inherited some special trait 
from one or the other of their parents, or, 
it may be, there are signs of some new 
trait that both the parents lacked, yet in- 
herited from some remote ancestor. Five 
years—possibly ten years—must pass be- 
fore there can be any certainty. Then, 
one spring, at last the seedlings themselves 
bear fruit. 
(To be Continued) 
—— 0 
RINGING THE CURRANT VINE IN 
GREECE. 
By F. B. Woop (British Consul at 
Patras). 
Patras is now the centre of the cur- 
rant trade, and what you call Zante cur- 
rants are produced in large quantities 
throughout most districts of the Pelopon- 
nesus. The total average annual produce 
is now about 160,000 tons, and of these 
about 140,000 are grown in this Consular 
district, and only about 20,000 in the 
Islands of Zante and Cephalonia. The 
practice of cincturing or ring-barking the 
currant plant (ring-cutting it is called in 
this country) dates back about 50 years, 
and was first introduced to combat the 
effects of the oidium blight. In 1852 
the entire crop of currants was at- 
tacked by this malady, and almost 
completely destroyed. No remedy was 
discovered, and the 1853 and 1854 
crops suffered equally. In 1855 the 
sulphur remedy was successfully ap- 
plied, i.e., sulphur in fine powder sprinkled 
over the vines with bellows two or three 
times during the early stages of growth in 
the spring. The malady was arrested, 
but the plants, evidently suffering from 
the effects of this three years’ visitation, 
were much weakened, and only bore very 
small berried and shrivelled fruit. Some 
growers, at the instigation, no doubt, of 
some agricultural school, first attempted 
ring cutting-in 1855—with satisfactory re- 
sults—the fruit attained much greater 
development, and when dried the berry 
was almost double the size of the unring- 
cut produce. The bold currants gradually 
grew into favor in most markets, and dur- 
ing the course of the last 50 years the en- 
tire currant crop, one may say, is annually 
subjected to this process. Only in Zante 
and Cephalonia do they still grow a few 
hundred tons of unring-cut: currants, as 
they are called in trade. 
PROCESS UNNATURAL. 
The process is, of course, anomalous 
and unnatural, and has proved very detri- 
mental to the vitality of the currant vine, 
and to the keeping quality of the dried 
currant. It is very difficult to give ac- 
curate figures and statistics in reference to 
a growth which has really only been under 
careful scientific observation for the last 
30 years; but it is traditionally reported 
and believed, that the currant vine, before 
ring-cutting was resorted to, retained its 
Dec. 1, 1908 
full vitality and full bearing power for a 
century “and moré; whereas the ‘present 
plants begin to show signs of decay after 
30 or 40 years. Ring-cut currants, al- 
though much bolder than unring-cut pro- 
duce, are not nearly so sweet, and also 
lose their aromatic flavor and smell to a 
great extent. The skin of the berry also, 
which in the unring-cut currant is very 
thin and velvety to the touch, becomes 
coarse and hard to the touch and taste. 
FRUIT UNMERCHAN TABLE, 
It is an axiom with currants that the more 
saccharine matter they contain tne better - 
they are in appearance, flavor, touch, and 
keeping quality. The unring-cut cur- 
rant, before 1852, used to keep perfectly 
sound and sweet for ten years or more, 
whereas the ring-cut fruit begins to fall 
off after tie first year, and is generally 
unmerchantable after the third season. 
ONCK RUNG ALWAY> RONG. 
It may pe pertinently asked why the © 
ring-cutting is persisted in, considering its 
baneful results to plant and produce; but 
the answer is that when the system has 
been once adopted it can no longer be 
abandoned, without total loss of crop, for 
some years, and this no grower in the 
country can afford. It must also be ob- 
served that the weight produced per acre 
by ring-cutting is almost double that of 
unring-cut plants, and this is a compensat- 
ing advantage which no doubt accounts 
for the fact that even new plantations are 
subjected to ring-cutting. Some growers 
have informed me that cutting and slips 
have acquired a hereditary liking to ring- 
cutting, and that it is doubtful if they 
would produce without it; but I do not 
credit this. The ring-cutting is done in 
this country a few days after the fruit has 
set, and mostly on the main stem—in some 
districts it is done on each minor stem, and 
this, it is said, is less detrimental to the 
plant. ‘The Peronospora malady which 
did such wholesale damage to the currant 
crop in 1900, is now successfully combated, 
by spraying the vines with a solution, 14 
to 2 per cent. of sulphate of copper, L 
per cent. slaked lime and water.—‘‘Journal 
of Agriculture,” Victoria. 
SOUTH AUSTRALIAN GRASSES. 
By J. G. O. Teprer, F.L.S. 
The grasses form a large order, distri- 
buted over the whole habitable earth, and 
are so uniform in structure of the repro- 
ductory organs and aspect, that but few 
other orders at all compare with it. In 
point of fact the Gramineae or. Grasses 
furnish perhaps the greatest number of in- 
dividuals of any, not even excepting fores& 
trees, for they actually clothe immense 
areas almost alone, and still larger ones 
partially, very few parts of the earth being 
destitute of meadows of some sort. More- 
over, grasses furnish man and his proteges, 
the domestic animals, with by far the 
largest amount of food, for wheat, barley, 
oats, rye, millet, sugarcane, &c., are alk 
members of the order, though many per- 
sons would scarcely rank the above-named — 
as such. All are more or less social im 
