Dwarf fruit trees

by F. A. Waugh

Later, when I planted an orchard in Oklahoma, I put in some dwarf trees, particularly pears, but I did not stay there long enough to see what came of them.

The next fruit garden in which I became interested was in Vermont. This had in it some dwarf pear trees, dwarf apples and dwarf plums, and my own personal experience had fairly begun. The dwarf apples proved to be an almost complete failure, for reasons which I can not now satisfactorily explain. A few years later I planted a few dwarf apple trees in another Vermont garden, where they did reasonably well. But, at any rate, the whole undertaking was unsatisfactory, for it did not give me a vital understanding of the trees. I never got onto terms of real personal goodfellowship with them; and until a gardener does that his work is some sort of a failure.

The dwarf pears did somewhat better. They seemed to understand their business, and they kept about it without much attention from me. I never cared much for pears, anyway.

But the plums were the brilliant success, at least with reference to my own interior personal experience. Every plum tree meant something to me. A stub of a root and two scrawny plum branches would at any time arouse my imagination like the circus posters' appeal to a boy. In this Vermont garden which I adopted when it was about four years old, there were various plum trees, mostly of domestica varieties, growing on Americana roots. They had come from the Iowa State College, where they had been educated that way. They had been given those Americana roots, not primarily to dwarf them, but to insure them against damage from the cold winters. The tops had not been cut back, and the whole treatment was just such as would have been applied to standards. Later I saw the bad results of this treatment, for several of the trees blew over in high winds. From subsequent experience I feel sure that if they had been headed low at first, if they had been kept closely headed back and otherwise handled like real dwarfs, they would have lived to a greater age and would have made everybody happier.

At this time also I began, on a somewhat comprehensive plan, the propagation of plums on all sorts of stocks, including Americana, Wayland seedlings, Miner root cuttings and sand cherry, all more or less efficient dwarfing stocks. By this time I was into it head over ears, as far as the plums were concerned.

This having been the largest chapter in my personal pomological experience, I suppose it ought to form the largest portion of this chapter in the book; but my plum work and my experiments in propagation have been so often and so fully reported elsewhere that it would be a vain repetition to go over them again now. They are all written down in the proper places where they may be consulted by the enthusiastic or ill-advised student.

And then I came to Massachusetts; and here the first project, almost, to which my hand was turned was the installation of a garden of dwarf fruit trees. From the following memorandum of the trees growing in this garden any reader may surmise the enjoyment I have found in it. There is one row of dwarf plum trees set six feet apart and trained, rather unsatisfactorily, into bush form. The trees were many of them too large when they came from France, and, though I cut them back severely, they did not form such low bushy heads as my ideal species. They are on St. Julien roots, which serve the purposes in hand fairly well. Though the trees had a hard trip across the water only one out of forty-six has died in three years. Unfortunately these trees have not yet borne fruit,—not one of them. Next year many of them will bear. Earlier fruitage can certainly be secured on sand cherry stocks and under other methods of training.

Besides the bush plums, the garden contains a row of upright cordons. Most of these were not propagated on dwarf stocks at all, and were not expected to suffer any such drastic training as I have put upon them. They were taken from the college nursery and from the nurseries of several of my correspondents, just wherever I could find the varieties I wanted, and without reference to the stocks on which they were growing. A few are on Americana stocks, several are on peach roots (of all things), and probably a majority are growing on the usual Myrobalan roots. These trees are planted two feet apart in the row and are tied up to a trellis of chicken wire. There are about thirty varieties in the row, numbering most of the different botanical types more frequently cultivated in North America. Many of the varieties are totally and very obviously unsuited to this method of treatment, and presently I will replace them with more amenable varieties. But many of the varieties have fruited, especially the Japanese kinds, and some of them, like Burbank, have proved most unexpectedly docile. Altogether this row of unsuitably propagated and unsuitably selected varieties of plum trees has been one of the most interesting, instructive and entertaining elements in my dwarf fruit garden.

Next there comes a trellis bearing some espaliers, including plums, pears, apples, peaches and cherries; but these have been recently planted, and as yet they have done nothing worth relating.

There is one row of twenty-three dwarf pears, mostly trained in pyramid form. These have not done well, but the reason is not far to seek. The soil is light and full of gravel, and quite unsuited to pear or quince. Pears never thrive on it. Several of the trees are bearing a crop this year, but some of the trees are also dead, and the whole row looks like the finish of a bargain sale on the remnant ribbon counter.