The new horticultureкнига
Аннотация: The New Dispensation. INpresenting the second part of this volume to the atten- tion of the fruit-growing public, I do it with a feeling of confidence that the time is ripe for a new dispensation of horticultural truths, and while they may, with their novelty, startle from their sleepy routine many of the high priests who minister around the altars throughout the country, the kindly reception awarded them in this section is an earnest of their general adoption everywhere in the near future.The public now demand the best of fruit, and they want it cheap.The day of high prices has probably gone forever, and it is a doubtful question whether fruit-growing, with the short-lived, unproductive, diseased and insect-ridden trees of to-day, and their uncertain crops, now pays.To practice the most ad- vanced methods (taught by Mr. J. H. Hale, for instance, on peaches, and by others on apples, pears, etc.) requires an expenditure that is often not even covered by the receipts.The amount of extra nurturing, coddling and special petting, sometimes called " intensive handling," in the way of cultiva- tion, pruning, thinning, fertilizing and spraying, to make pay an orchard grown from three-or four-year-old, long, fibrous- rooted trees, is appalling ; and when we contrast it with the cer- tain, cheap and easy-going style in which the twenty-year-old Rambo apple tree, mentioned in the last chapter of this vol- ume, brings in the dollars, we may well cry, ' 'Hasten the good time when all fruits can be thus grown!"That is the mis- sion of this gospel of the "New Horticulture" I now advocate, which, though nominally new, is really as old as the morn in spring in the long, long ago, ages before Eve plucked and Adam ate the apple, when the warm sunbeams kissed the dew from the first modestly opening fruit blooms, whenever that was.Its principles, from which we have now wandered (i) THE NEW HORTICULTURE.so far, to our great loss, are identical with those practiced from the beginning by wise Mother Nature.With lavish hand she scattered the seed that fell upon the solid earth, and produced trees after their kind, from which, down through the puzzling maze of ages of evolution and the survival of the fittest, where her original forests stand, she now presents to our admiring gaze majestic evidences of her skill.To illus- trate those principles is the main object of this book.Plain as they are, I stumbled over them for years, like the rest of the horticultural world, blind to the patent fact that in all their peculiarities of growth and treatment, both fruit and forest trees are the same.They are both the result of specific conditions and surroundings.No fostering hand of man, with friendly cultivator, spade or plow, was present during the millions of years of their evolution, to kindly aid in their struggles with climatic adversities the sturdy monarchs of the forest, which from the frigid to the torrid zone, in slowly changing cycles of climate, have crowned the rocky hills and mountains and covered the broad valleys with their sheltering boughs.So they have, through succeeding generations, adapted themselves perfectly to their environments by the survival of the fittest, and from age to age found in the firm, unbroken virgin soil, with no disturbance of their surface roots, the conditions best suited to their perfect development.The same law applies to fruit trees as well.Perhaps, if our horticultural scientists had their way, and through successive generations of like-minded descendants, could but grow fruit trees for a million or so years more, con- tinuously from long-rooted ones, on ground subsoiled and deeply pulverized, they might ultimately, like nature, evolve a race of trees that would prefer and thrive best on such a soil, and fruit perhaps as well as Mr. Pierce's Rambo apple tree, alluded to hereafter, or live as long as the old Seckel or Sudduth pear.But the trees we now have to deal with retain too much of the perversity of their wild parents not to kick at such treatment.The experiments recounted later on, of Mr. Patterson and trie squirrels, and the stunted pear trees in my Hitchcock orchard, on a muck bed, with two feet of rich surface soil beneath them, prove this beyond all doubt.Seeing, then, that they foolishly reject our efforts in their be- half, why not, as it costs so much less, and the trees produce so much more and finer fruit, indulge them in their long-time preferences.However, before entering my plea for this course, I will in a short digression make some remarks : ist, on the old primitive orchards of our forefathers ; and, also, 2d, give a short account of how I happened to hit upon the great fundamental principle of all entirely succcessful horti- culture, that the nearer we can bring a transplanted tree to the form of a seed, the better it will be for the tree, as will be seen by the following recent extract from Farm and Ranch:While viewing the path of the recent tornado that swept through the city of Sherman, Texas, destroying scores of precious lives and happy homes, I noticed the effect of the force on the trees.Some trees were uprooted, some snapped off above ground, some stripped of limbs and bark and others were twisted into splinters.One large post oak, about two feet in diameter, was splintered and twisted like a huge rope.A large apple orchard was uprooted, and I searched in vain for a tap-root on any of those apple trees.They had the appearance of being planted with long roots and tramped into a small hole, with the point of the roots near the surface where they remained and continued to grow.The soil was rich, sandy loam on deep, rich, moist clay.The forest trees were large and strong, and most of them refused to be uprooted and were snapped off.Had these trees been planted so as to induce the growth of strong tap- roots, evidently they would have been larger, stronger, healthier and more fruitful.E. W. KIRKPATRICK. CHAPTER II.Old Primitive Orchards.is no more interesting subject for investigation, nor one that has puzzled observers more completely, than why we are unable now to grow as healthy, long- lived and productive fruit trees as our forefathers.Many and various have been the theories advanced, but the most general one seems to be that in the early settlement of the country the vast forest area had a mysterious and potent in- fluence on climate and tree diseases, and that the gradual clearing of the land has, somehow or other, changed conditions so radically that fruit trees in general, and certain varieties in particular, no longer succeed as they formally did.Where once in the eastern states the apple and the pear attained the giant proportions of forest trees, now, as a rule, they crouch and cower in valley and on hill, their puny, stunted, blighting offspring a pitiful burlesque, in many instances, of their grand old sires.I came across a statement a few days ago, that in 1721, a small "settlement of forty families near Boston made three thousand barrels of cider, and another New England village of two hundred families made ten thousand barrels."Pre- sumably they reserved fruit enough for all domestic uses, fresh and dried, and this vast amount of cider was simply from the surplus fruit.Remembering that those were days of small family orchards, not of thousands of acres like we now plant, can we anywhere find a parallel in productiveness to-day?The trees that gave those enormous yields were presumably either seedlings, root grafts or grown from small one-year maiden trees, with few roots when set, except the tap, and those doubtless cut off not far below the surface.The nurseryman, with his large, fine, three and four-year-old, long, fibrous-rooted trees, like those now sold, had not yet (4) OLD PRIMITIVE ORCHARDS.5 appeared upon the stage to captivate those" rustic growers with visions of early fruit.And while on its face there may seem to be some show of reason in this theory of climatic change as the cause for all this acknowledged inferiority and decay, yet when examined in the cold light of statistical climatology and actual experience, it crumbles, a baseless fabric, to the ground.The records, from the earliest times, show no material change in average temperature or rainfall between then and now, and we still have, here and there, all over the country, strong, vigorous and productive old seed- ling trees, like the Sudduth pear in Illinois, and the Arkansas Mammoth Black-Twig apple, which show beyond all doubt that in certain places, and under certain conditions, it is still possible to grow apple and pear trees fit companions to those of long ago, and which tower among the fruit trees of to-day, like Saul among his brethren, head and shoulders above them all.These hale old mementos of by-gone days are living witnesses against the theory of climatic change, for C. M.Stark, of Missouri, in American Garden of January, says :"The original Mammoth Black-Twig apple tree is still standing near Rhea's Mill, in Washington county, Arkansas, and bearing fruit, and at the recent meeting of the State Horticultural Society of that state, at Fayettville, there was an exhibit of apples from this tree labeled, 'M.B.-Twig, from the original tree, sixty-five years old, two feet eight inches in diameter 2*^f eet above the ground."And yet, just across the state line in Kansas, the well-known king of apple grow- ers, Mr. Frank Wellhouse, the owner of 1,200 acres of trees, plants sixteen feet apart in the rows, because in twelve or fifteen years he finds that his long-rooted, well sprayed and cultivated trees, standing on thoroughly prepared ground, cease to pay.These being some of the facts in the case, what is the true answer to the New York Legislature's call last year for information as to the acknowledged decadence of modern orchards, especially the apple ?It will not do to talk apologetically, in explanation of repeated crop failures, about the great number of fungous enemies, late frosts, dry seasons, chilling winds 8 THE NEW HORTICULTURE.with short roots, for which he will cheerfully take half price.But to return to our immediate forefathers and their doings in the fields of horticulture.Naturally, in very dry seasons or in case of neglected trees, set with large tops, the tangled mass of feeble, fibrous roots would fail to take hold in the soil, and, exhausted by evaporation from the tops, would die.Then at once went up the cry, "More root !"Why not?Taught to believe that roots were absolutely necessary, nat- urally the planter would conclude, the more the better, just as is taught in all the books to-day ; and indeed, so firmly is it fixed in the minds of many of our most eminent fruit grow- ers that, though earnestly requested to do so, they will not even plant a single close root-pruned tree as an experiment.This has for several years been my general experience, in try- ing to inaugurate this all-important reform.And yet it is absolutely the foundation of all permanent success in the orchards of the future.We have now got to a point where a small one-year tree is considered worthless, and it is wellnigh impossible to sell a tree that has not been transplanted once, and oftener twice, to give it plenty of roots, and when such trees are planted, with all their matted fibrous roots, the doom of that orchard is sealed, whether it be with blight and scab in the pear and apple, yellows in the peach, or black- knot and root-tumor in the plum and peach.Such orchards are bound to fail early, become diseased, and die.And so, in tracing the probable course and progress of horticulture in this country from the earliest times down until now, we find that of necessity, commencing with seedlings and root-grafts (practically my method), its whole history has been a descent from health, longevity and productiveness in the beginning, as history and tradition both prove, down to disease, early decay and unfruitfulness at the present time, and in an exact and direct ratio to the increased quantity of roots left on, and age of the trees when set.The older the tree and the more root, the worse for the tree ever afterwards.Just how I happened to discover this important truth will be told in the next chapter. CHAPTER III.How I Discovered Close Root-Pruning. ASthis principle of horticulture is absolutely the most important, without a single exception, in the whole science, and the foundation of all permanent success, it is most astonishing that men have stumbled over it almost daily from the beginning, and never realized its value.The ordinary root-graft has been the most common form of prop- agation for most fruit trees for time out of mind, and every nurseryman knows what superior trees can be thus grown in a single season.And yet it has never occurred to any one to say : If a small piece of root will make such a fine tree, why will not the same principle apply the second or any other year afterward ?Just how the value of this method did first present itself to me is as follows : Nobody here having any faith in the success of my venture of pear planting, I found it impossible at first to sell but few of the trees I had grown from cuttings, but having hopes that the astonishing vigor
Год издания: 1906
Авторы: H. M. Stringfellow
Ключевые слова: Flowering Plant Growth and Cultivation
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