The Garden Under Glass

i68 THE GARDEN UNDER GLASS (which are the real cause of the mischief) are found, they should certainly be cut off. This system of root-pruning must be practised if good crops of fniit are to be forth-coming. The best time to do it is as soon as the leaves have fallen. Pruning and Training Peach-Trees It is, I think, generally admitted that the training of trees is to a large extent a dying art in gardening. Especi-ally is this the case with peaches and nectarines, which do not admit of such rigid training as apples and pears, owing to the faet that their pruning varies considerably from these and necessitates a taking down and rearrange-ment of the branches. Now the practice of some growers is to be wholly indifferent to the position of the branches. They maintain, and rightly, that fruit is the essential consideration and that the position of the branches is a matter of no conse-quence. With the simple reservation that I know there are cases where a gardener cannot find time to do the work in as efficient a manner as he would wish, I must differ from that opinion. I contend that the difference in the manner of training does not involve so mueh more time as is imagined. But the result of straight training is that it gives the tree a better appearance and the gardener a better name. In the beginning of my gardening career I came under the tuition of a gardener of the old school who was very particular about the training of fruit-trees in general and peach-trees in particular. He would have every shoot trained out perfeetly straight, both in the glass houses and on the outside walls, so straight that no two branches ever crossed or could conceivably have crossed had the shoots