Freakish Experiments
An ingenious gardener of my acquaintance, who delighted in freakish experiments, once showed me a tomato growing on the top of a potato on which he had grafted it. The idea is not suggested as of commercial utility ! Another device very freely practised in the same garden, may perhaps in certain places be worth adoption. The gardener neither grafted nor budded his trees in the usual manner. He would plant the maidens in a circle round the tree which he wished to multiply and wed the living =severed shoots of the central tree to the surrounding standards. They generally " took " very well. In the art and craft of gardening budding has been getting the better of grafting as a method of starting new trees. Nurserymen find it both easier and cheaper. On the other hand the habit of changing from one variety to another by wholesale grafting has increased ; and it can now be done with marvellous speed in the art of metamorphosis. By a more or less new process you may graft twigs as well as boughs without the need of elaborate wrapping and greasing. I saw a very large pear tree on a beautiful South African fruit farm that had been just grafted in over a hundred places.
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