When a traveller was relating, in Cowper’s presence, some prodigious marvels, the poet smiled somewhat incredulously. “Well, sir, don’t you believe me? I saw it with my own eyes.” “Oh, certainly, I believe it if you saw it, but I would not if I had seen it myself.” Even so we feel about the thousand and one physiological fooleries which run the monthly rounds of the papers.
How on earth do men suppose a fruit to receive its characteristic quality? Is it from the root, trunk, pith, bark, branch, or leaf? One would think that it made no difference which. We have long supposed that the leaf digested the sap, returned it to the passages of distribution to be employed in the formation of fruit, wood, tissue, etc. Is this the function of the leaf? or have recent investigations
exploded this doctrine? If not, it will be apparent that all grafting of scions together, cannot change the quality of fruit, unless the leaves are also amalgamated. Is a red, green, yellow, and white fruit, sweet, sour, or bitter, be put upon the same tree, each will maintain its characteristics; because, each bud or scion has its own peculiar leaves, from whose laboratory the fruit is sweetened or acidulated and colored with all its hues. To be sure, fruits are affected by the stock on which they are put; but their characteristic elements are not altered, but only pushed along in the same line and made more perfect.
There is no doubt that trees indulge, occasionally, in rare antics. A sober apple-tree will sometimes let down its dignity, in what gardeners call a “sport,” e. g. a sweet apple may grow on a sour tree, and vice versâ. An apple may on one side be sweet and on the other sour. But, in such cases, the same general law is seen governing yet. We all know that great changes of temperament occur in men. A nervous temperament often becomes abdominal, and a little, wiry, fussy, peevish, minikin, becomes a round, plump, rosy, corpulent spot of good nature. Similar changes may occur, through disease, or the peculiarity of the season, or from unknown causes, in the structure of the leaves of a branch, and then the fruit will follow the change of the leaf.
But the fruit itself digests still further the elaborated sap sent to it from the leaf. If, then, from any hidden causes, the fruit should in part change its structure, the juices elaborated would be altered. If stamens and pistils may change to petals, if petals may change to leaves, if leaves may extend to branches, we know of no reason why the whole or the half of a fruit may not, also, alter its structure; and with its peculiarity of function, also, of course, the character of the fruit. While then we are not skeptical of “monsters,” “marvels,” “sports,” “singularities,” we think we can trace the original law through all the transmutations.
PROTECTING THE ROOTS OF FRUIT-TREES.
Cultivators are frequently urged in Horticultural papers to cover the roots of the peach-trees with heaps of snow, etc., that they may be retarded in the spring, and escape injury from late frosts upon their blossoms. This direction takes it for granted that the warmth of the ground starts the root, and the root starts the sap, and the sap wakes up the dormant branch. By covering the soil and keeping it back, the whole tree is supposed to be secured. But, unfortunately for this process, the motion of the sap is first in the BRANCHES, and last in the roots. Light and heat, exerted upon the branches for any considerable length of time, produce a high state of excitability; the sap begins to move toward the bud, its place is supplied by a portion lower down, and so on until the whole column of sap through the trunk is in motion, and last of all in the ROOT. But suppose warm, spring days, with a temperature of from sixty degrees to sixty-five degrees, have produced a vigorous motion of the sap in the branches and trunk, while the root, (thanks to snow and ice piled over it to keep it frozen), is dormant, what will result? The sap already within the tree will be exhausted, the root will supply none, the light and heat still push on the development of bud and leaf and the tree will exhaust itself and die. We not long since observed a remarkable confirmation of these reasonings. A gentleman of our acquaintance, in reading these unskilfull directions to cover the peach-tree root, opened trenches about his trees, and filled them with snow, heaping bountifully also all about the trees. The next spring, long after his trees should have been at work, the snow held the root fast; the buds swelled and burst, lingered, shrivelled and died—and the trees too. This might have been prognosticated. There are partial methods of protecting the peach from too early development, but they all have respect to the protection of the
limbs. If the branches can be covered during the random and prematurely hot days of spring, the tree will not suffer. High, and cool-aired aspects, north hill-sides, northern sides of houses, barns, etc., will answer this purpose. When it can be afforded, long boards may be set up upon the east and south sides of choice trees, upon a frame slightly made and easily removed.