The summers and winters during the past six years have been the most trying known to the history of the west on orchard fruits. So far as I know the wreck of western orchards has known no parallel in the world's history. On the college grounds the old orchard of 1,200 trees, planted prior to our experimental work with the Russian fruits, was totally wrecked and is now a clover field. Of the 118 varieties - the hardiest of the old list - the Duchess, Whitney's No. 20 and Tetofsky were the only really sound trees left when the orchard was grubbed out. In like manner our pear, European plum and cherry orchards of the old lists have been destroyed and the stubs dug out. Over a large part of the state, east of the Missouri divide, this orchard wrecking has been as complete as with us, yet on certain ridge soil, where the wood has ripened better in autumn, many varieties of the grade of hardiness of Cole's Quince, Fa-meuse, Wealthy, Gros Pomier, Plumb's Cider, Willow and Talman Sweet have stood fairly well.

In the experimental orchard the seedlings, and standard varieties on Gros Pomier, have mainly been grubbed out, and a number of varieties of the Russians have been injured by blight or sunscald.

Yet the fact remains that, taken as a whole, it is now the thriftiest and healthiest orchard east of the Missouri divide in Iowa, and has borne very heavy crops of fine fruit for all seasons from July to March. Last year and this we were able to show at our State Fair fully one hundred varieties of handsome and good fall and winter apples for either desert or culinary use. In estimating the quality of Russian fruits, two main facts must be taken into consideration:

(1.) The Russians grow many varieties of fine even-sized apples which are alone used for cooking.

The descriptive list of the varieties we imported from Moscow found in the report of the Montreal Horticultural Society for 1886 will illustrate this. The varieties recommended for cooking as a rule have some astring-ency when eaten raw, such as is found in the Silken Leaf, Hibernal and Recumbent, yet they contain more grape sugar than our common apples, and are not excelled for culinary use.

(2.) The varieties Dr. Shroeder recommends for table use and cooking, or exclusively for table use, are always mildly acid, sub-acid or sweet, and with a tenderness and sprightliness not found in our apples classed by Downing as "good " or "very good." While there are no varieties as high in quality as Early Joe, Dyer, Grimes' Golden and Jonathan, we have many for all seasons that will rank with Early Harvest, Porter, Fameuse, Wealthy, Domine and Baldwin. This is especially true of the apples from Oral, Voronesh and the Bogdanoff estates, but they are not infrequent in the collections made by Dr. Regel and Dr. Shroeder. As with our common apples, the highest quality is not found with those that keep longest with common care.

The story of quality, season, relative value, etc., of the varieties longest tested is told in our Bulletin of 1890 as accurately as it can be done until they are handled by the barrel and binfull.

The Apple #1

There are many casual observers woo jump to the conclusion that the practice of budding is the cause of this, and to those who only look at the outside there is much to support this view. From the window where I write I can look out on a lot of seedling peach trees, whose age I can only guess at, but which cannot be less than twenty-6ve years. They are pictures of health. Budding is not, per se, responsible for the failure, I think, but rather the carelessness of our nurserymen in growing stocks for budding. All over the land there has been an insane sort of impression that peaches must be budded upon stocks raised from southern natural seed. These seeds are collected by country storekeepers in Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere - and are almost invariably saved from half ripe peaches cut for drying. They are not only half ripe, but from the stunted, starved trees one sees all through this country. The constant use of seed of such poor vitality is largely the cause of the short life of the tree budded on these stocks.

The late Col. Edward Wilkins, of Maryland, at one time the largest peach grower in the state, had a theory that much of the trouble of or-chardists came from the trees being budded on dissimilar stocks - a late peach on seed from an early one, etc.

He once raised a large orchard in accordance with this idea. He saved seed from the earliest to the latest peaches, and budded them with similar sorts. The seeds were all from budded trees, yet this orchard was one of the longest lived and most successful orchards in the peach district. Many of the trees grew to an enormous size, and when Col. Wilkins built the present mansion at Peach Tree Hall, the newel post of the grand stairway, a very large and ornamental one, was turned from the solid heart-wood of a giant peach tree. This newel post, in its finished state, if I remember right, is nearly one foot in diameter. The members of the American Pomological Society who attended the meeting in Baltimore in 1877, visited this place, and many will doubtless remember the peach-tree stairway. I firmly believe that if our nurserymen would select their seed from healthy trees, without any regard to their being seedlings, the success of budded trees would soon be equal to the seedling ones. - W. F. Massey, North Carolina Experimental Station.