SOME RANK HERESY ON BUDDING AND GRAFTING - MRS. TARRYER AS POMONA - A NEW METHOD WITH TREE AGENTS - A PARSON'S GRAFTING.

COME, BOYS!" said Mrs.

Tarryer,after Thanksgiving supper, "get your tools, and let's see if we can't find two or three shrubby trees fit to dig for planting in the nursery, around the bushy trunks of the wild apple tree we have been eating the fruit of with so much satisfaction. Let's have one more thing to be thankful for - apple-trees on their own roots. Go get your tools and I will go with you ; a walk will settle my supper".

Presently five tall young men, surrounding their leader, turned down the corner into the meadow towards a certain hedge-row, where a young seedling tree has distinguished itself by filling three barrels with fair apples this wormy season. Every one who has tasted them wanted more.

She despises budding and grafting above ground, and so did her ancestors before her. She says those artificial tricks would never have been practiced, at the rate we have run them by wholesale, except during the darkest ages of American gardening, when nothing was sacred from light-fingered manipulations. One of her griefs in going to the neighbors, is that she finds no such piquant variety of fruit as the old orchards were full of, but the same formal trade trash, all alike distasteful, from house to house, and never anything racy of our own soil. And while she knows we might do better, it vexes her to see the places of honor and profit at our little country parties given to figs, bananas, oranges and grapes - all imported.

"Too far from the original root," is her remark about the tough-skinned fruit she sees in market, "You can use scions one or two removes from the native tree without much loss of quality, but after that degradation is rapid. And what frightens me" she says, "is to see people growing up and taking charge of our affairs without the sense of taste to notice whither our progress is tending".

By a long correspondence concerning a barrel of extra red, tender, white-fleshed, juicy and spicy Baldwins from Michigan, she proved they were propagated within a cut or two of the original Massachusetts tree and had rooted from the scion. She repeated these investigations in several other quarters - with an industry worthy of a director of small experiment station, and with similar results ! At one of our winter-meetings she exhibited a bushel of indubitable Baldwins, yellow as Bellflowers; ditto of green ones, each sort respectively selected from two lots at our grocers. Both were bitter, tough and corky, with the worst characteristics of the Baldwin predominant. She stood by her show for hours and talked - giving away the two bushels of degraded specimens and also a couple of bushels more of superb reds from a certain local orchard whose honeyed juice sticks to the fingers so that guests need a chance to wash after eating them. These last she knows were grafted from near the parent stock.

Very few people understand that all our good apples were once natural fruit seedlings.

Likewise the R. I. Greening - that heartiest and most satisfactory of after-dinner apples, under the waist-band - has been shockingly maltreated by its manufacturers. You should see Mrs. Tarryer, in the courage of her convictions, explaining the Greening decadence to a dubious fruit committee at an agricultural fair ; with the toe of her little boot slightly projecting from her trim fitting gown of black stuff, and one of those bogus Greenings balanced on the tips of her thumb and fingers, where everybody can see it. *4 That is the kind of apples we grow to sell - not to eat, gentlemen. It has what we call "good handling qualities" - giving it a little bound on the table between the plates and catching it again to prove it. "The old flat Greening, when you find it, will be all green till it begins to ripen and then it will grow yellow with the maturing sugar. It should always be tart, however, and never what you call mellow, but melting.

"We produce this kind of apple to ship, gentlemen. We can ship it to New York, and from there we can ship it to Hartford, Springfield and Boston, looking for big fools enough to buy it. On many hotel tables it is used to check consumption. The servants won't eat it. English cities are depending on us for cider apples, but they don't want rubber Greenings or corky Baldwins even for that purpose".

Mrs. Tarryer was once Pomona of a Grange, and she set her brother nurserymen of the Order in a good deal of a flutter for their craft by describing in open meeting how apple-trees are manufactured now by wholesale : "There may be blocks of fifty or a hundred thousand trees or more ready for market in the ground any October. These are cut under the roots by horse-power, pulled up and laid in trenches handy for the drive of spring trade and packing. Then the ground where they stood is plowed and every bit of a root as big as my little finger, or a pipe-stem, is gathered and stowed away for making what are called 'root-grafts,' at $2 to$4 a thousand, packed in barrels. Prunings of the next year's sale-stocks are cut as wanted for scions, and skilled hands are kept busy all winter in warm quarters grafting these bits of roots. So anybody who can plant onions and cabbage-stumps for greens in spring can be a nurseryman. It may, and probably does happen, by this system, that our oldest varieties of fruit have been beheaded and stuck upon alien roots as many as fifty times over. The wonder is, brethren and sisters, that any characteristic virtue of a variety should remain after this treatment.

True to name apples may be, but in practice the orchardist finds, that by the mingling of divers nursery-stocks - -transported and exchanged in every direction - that we are never sure of receiving two trees bearing fruit exactly alike, even of the inferior qualities, or roots that agree with the subsoils of any section. As new crops of dupes spring up hither and yon, this ignorant and nefarious trade continues, and many orchards are planted after this fashion, but rarely a single one that is good for anything".