ntially a gardening practice. It
requires great skill. The spurs are produced and protected to a
nicety. Every fruit may be the separate product of handwork. The
fertilizing, mulching, watering, are carefully regulated for every
tree. Often the trees are trained on cordons, espaliers, trellises or
walls. The individual fruits may be tied up or bagged. All this is
very different from the raising of apples by means of tractors and
other machinery, gangs of pruners and pickers, broadside extensive
methods, with highly organized systems of handling and marketing, in
all of which the money-measure is the chief consideration. It is for
all these reasons that the growing of a few dwarf apple-trees may
afford such intimate satisfaction to a careful man who prizes the
result of his skill.

The dwarfs are grown as little trees branching near the ground, headed
in at top and side and kept within shape and bounds. If they are of
the dwarfest dwarfs and not trained on trellis or wall (as they
usually are not in America), the fruit may be gathered by a man
standing on the ground, even from old trees. The dwarfs are planted
eight to ten feet apart when grown in regular plantation.

Be it said that certain kinds of stocks produce trees only semi-dwarf;
and in all cases if the tree is planted so deep that roots strike from
the cion, the top will probably outgrow the stock, being supplied in
part or even entirely by its own roots.

This brings us to a consideration of some of the kinds of dwarf
stocks, or dwarf races of the apple-tree. Be it said, in understanding
of the subject, that there are naturally dwarf forms of many plants,
and probably all ordinary plants are capable of producing them. Thus
there are very compact condensed forms of arbor-vitae, Norway spruce,
peach-tree. These have originated as seed sports and are multiplied by
cuttings. So are there dwarf tomatoes, dwarf China asters, dwarf sweet
peas, all coming more or less true from seeds, for these species (of
short generations) have been bred to reproduce their variations. The
inquirer must not suppose, therefore, that the races of dwarf
apple-trees are an anomally in the vegetable kingdom.

It is customary to speak of two classes or races of dwarf apple-trees,
the Paradise and the Doucin. The former kinds are the smaller, the
trees on their own roots sometimes reaching not more than four feet in
height at full bearing maturity. On the Paradise stocks, the grafted
ap