21 DECEMBER 1945, Page 15

New Fruits In recent years there has been a great

increase, not wholly assisted even by the war, in the making of new sorts of fruit, though some of the old have been allowed to vanish. For example, in the best of all the experimental stations as many as forty-one new sorts of raspberry have now been sufficiently multiplied to try out on a field scale, and hopes of the high excellence of some of them are high. In the past accident has been a rival to conscious research. The Lloyd George raspberry, for example, famous as an autumnal fruiter, appeared as a chance seedling in a wood. In one respect Government should sit up and take notice. There are in existence a number of quite useless sorts of cultivated blackberry, and some commercial growers as well as private gardeners have been, so to say, planted with this half-barren stuff, and a considerable acreage has been perforce grubbed. Our research stations have been doing their best by propaganda to prevent such waste, but obviously it should be made illegal to foist what is unproductive on the public. The cause has been ignorance on the part both of buyer and seller, not fraud. In the same way half the walnut trees in the country are of little or no use, because a bad variety was scattered abroad by nurserymen some hull-Red years ago. Incidentally, a method of persuading the walnut to fruit at a much earlier age than of old has been discovered. 'People would not plant when they had to wait fifteen years or more for the first fruit. Among newer sorts, great things are expected of some of the newer apples, especially " Sunset."