PROFESSOR BAILEY'S article on peach cul-Picture, with particular reference to Michigan practices (March American Garden), is a practical one, and is good enough, with some modifications, for all this great country of ours. There is no point in horticulture that I have given so close attention since I came to California as the proper shape and pruning of the peach tree.

The system practiced here by the very best growers is very similar to that which Professor Bailey says is best in Michigan. We call it the wine-glass or vase-form here in California. About the only difference in the two systems is that here in our superlatively rich soils and long growing season we are forced to cut back quite severely each winter for the first five years, which is done mainly to keep the young tree in shape and within bounds, and to strengthen the base of the main branches. Some genuine experts in peach growing even recommend midsummer cutting back in the extra deep, rich soils of the hot interior valleys, and I am inclined to think the practice is right.

The illustrations of trees in the model Michigan orchards are very nearly perfect for California, except that the trees are too tall, and there are not twigs and foliage enough near the base of the main branches. This last is a most serious fault. This is a fault in Michigan, and would be ten times as faulty in this hot, dry climate of California. Such branches should be clothed with spurs and leaves from the main bifurcations up. This cannot be had unless the uppermost sprays of the trees are kept constantly thinned out. The large tree at the right, on page 131, has something of this, but not nearly enough. In that picture generally there is too great a stretch of bare branches, and they are too high.

About Petaluma, Sonoma county, California, one can see the most disastrous training of the peach - many trees eight and nine feet to the first green leaf, and the same is true all over California. But our expert fruit-growers do not grow such trees, especially peach trees. They are careful in forming, shaping, pruning and thinning them, and they are the men who get the coin from their trees.

In my mind s eye, the model peach orchard would be that in which the trees were twelve feet apart each way, and the trees never allowed to reach more than eight feet in height and seven feet in greatest diameter of top, with heads branching out within six to twelve inches of the ground; and then every inch of them should be clothed with foliage and fruit to their summits. They should be cultivated, fertilized (if they need it; here they generally do not), thinned and pruned on the most radical intensive system. Such a model orchard should be as thrifty, vigorous and fruitful when thirty or forty or more years old as it was at five years. But a peach or any other fruit tree cannot grow good fruit for any length of time, if fruit and foliage are crowded together at the extreme end of a branch without any foliage for six or nine feet; nor can the little bunch of crowded foliage on the end of such branches supply the necessary strength of branch, stem and root sufficient to keep up vigor and strength.

Why will not the same system which I have given for the peach apply to the apple and other fruits and give equally desirable results ? I think that it will, with some unimportant modifications to suit the species. Apple trees in the prairie states are in every way the best when trained with low heads, and then given no pruning whatever for the first fifteen years in orchard.

Sonoma County, California. D. B. Wier.