The Best Apple
In the west country a very expert grower of fruit grafted a number of his trees (which had borne a less valuable variety of fruit) with that best of commercial apples, Lord Lamboume. Now Lord Lambourne has a great many virtues not only as a delectable fruit, but as a tree. Among other qualities it is singularly free from canker. Nothing, however, is perfect ; and it was noticed—in that orchard for the first time—that a completely new malady had appeared. It is an odd and, it may be, almost harmless malady. The smaller boughs develop a rubber-like quality. They bend with ease without any tendency to break. When you take one of these boughs in your hand, and bend it, the feeling is of an india-rubber consistency. When the fruit comes the tree assumes the appearance of a weeping variety, and the lacrimose boughs never wholly recover their poise. Presumably there is no reason why a weeping app"..e-tree should not bear plenty of fruit, and it might perhaps have aesthetic value ; but this strange tendency both puzzles the botanists, and naturally more or less alarms a fruit-grower who has converted a good part of an orchard by grafting. The older Lord Lambournes in the orchard are entirely free from the India-rubber tendency. Injections (of magnesium or what not) are being tried by some of the experts to see whether the boughs suffer from some chemical deficiency.
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