Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. How I Discovered Close Root-Pruning. AS this principle of horticulture is absolutely the most important, without a single exception, in the whole science, and the foundation of all permanent success, it is most astonishing that men have stumbled over it almost daily from the beginning, and never realized its value. The ordinary root-graft has been the most common form of propagation for most fruit trees for time out of mind, and every nurseryman knows what superior trees can be thus grown in a single season. And yet it has never occurred to any one to say : If a small piece of root will make such a fine tree, why will not the same principle apply the second or any other year afterward ? Just how the value of this method did first present itself to me is as follows : Nobody here having any faith in the success of my venture of pear planting, I found it impossible at first to sell but few of the trees I had grown from cuttings, but having hopes that the astonishing vigor and thrift of my orchard would start a demand, I dug the young trees for several years, and transplanted to keep them from getting too large, as they surely would, judging from the way the orchard was doing. So we opened wide furrows and, spreading out the pear tree roots evenly, according to the universal directions, covered them nicely and firmed the ground well. Being an old market-gardener, though a new nurseryman, and a believer in manure, as already shown, I gave the rows of young trees a good dressing of cotton-seed meal, and with fair cultivation, at the end of the year I had no cause for complaint, as they all did well. But even that early I had caught on to the fact that, for some unexplained reason, the cuttings planted at the same time as the rooted trees always averaged much better. M...