Pleasant Talk About Fruits, Flowers and Farming

by Henry Ward Beecher

vessels, but the sap itself will be but imperfectly elaborated by the leaves. We may suppose that overfeeding in vegetables is, in its effects, analogous to overfeeding in animals. The sap is but imperfectly decomposed in the leaf—it passes into the channels for elaborated sap in a partially undigested state—it deposits imperfect secretions, and the whole tissue resulting from it will partake of the defects of the proper juice.[12]

Thus a too rapid growth not only enlarges the sap passages, but forms their sides and the whole vegetable tissue of imperfect matter. This accounts, not only for the perishableness of quickly-grown timber, but, doubtless, for the short-lived tendency of cultivated fruit in comparison with wildings. For where the tissue is imperfectly formed, general weakness must ensue.

These reasonings do not include plants which, in their original nature, have a system of large sap-vessels, etc., and which naturally are rapid growers, but respects only plants which have been forced to this condition by circumstances.

Has this condition of the vegetable substance nothing to do with the health of a tree? Does it not very much determine its liability to disease?—its excitability? Where are trees liable to diseases of the circulation? In England, in New England, where, by climate and soil, growth is slow?—or in the Western and Middle States, where, by climate, by soil, and by vicious treatment, the growth is excessive? This leads me to review the methods employed in rearing fruit-trees.

The nursery business is a commercial business, and aims at profit. It is the interest of nurserymen to sell largely, and to bring their trees into market in the shortest possible time from the planting of the seed and the setting of the

bud, to the sale of the tree. But independently of this, few nurserymen know, accurately, the nature of the plants which they cultivate, and still less the habits of each variety. Why should they, when learned pomologists are content to know as little as they? The trees are highly cultivated and closely side-pruned. The vigor of a tree, i. e. the rapidity with which it will grow, determines its favor. Sorts which take time, and require a longer treatment, are regarded with disfavor. Everything is sacrificed to rapid growth and early maturity.

Next, and proceeding in the same evil direction, comes the orchard cultivation. From what quarter have we, mostly, derived our opinions and practices in fruit cultivation? From French, English, and New England writers. But is the system which they pursue fit for us? There is an opposite extreme to high cultivation; there are evils besetting low-cultivation. In cold, wet, stiff, barren soils, and in a cool, or humid, or cloudy atmosphere, trees require stimulants. The soil needs drying, warming, manuring; and the tree requires pruning. But such a system is ruinous, where the soil is full of fiery activity, bursting out with an irrepressible fertility and a superabundant vegetation; where the long summer days are intensely brilliant, and the air warm enough to ripen fruit even in the densest shade of an unpruned tree.

A traveller in Lapland would require the most bracing and stimulating food; but in New Orleans it would produce fever and death. A region, subject to all the diseases and evils of vegetable plethora, has adopted the practice of regions subject to the opposite evils. While receiving with gratitude, at the hands of eminent foreign physiologists and cultivators, the principles, we must establish the ART of horticulture, by a practice conformable to our own circumstances. A treatment which in England would only produce healthful growth, in this country would pamper a tree to a luxurious fullness. Let us not be deluded by the fallacious

appearance of our orchards. The evils which we have to fear are not shown forth in the early history of a tree or an orchard. On the contrary, the appearance will be flattering. The apple is a more hardy tree than the pear, and will endure greater mismanagement; but in the long run we shall have to pay for our greedy cultivation, even in the apple family. Our pear-trees are already evincing the evils of a too luxuriant habit; and if the West is ever to become the pear-region of America, the culture of this tree must be adapted to the peculiarities of western soil and climate.

It will be borne in mind that our remarks upon the cultivation of fruit-trees are not applicable to the processes of art employed in experimental gardens, or in climates requiring a highly artificial culture, but to gardens and open orchards of the pear and apple in the middle and Western States.