them for unprotected exposure to our seasons.
Even of our native fruits, some of the most
delicious varieties have been originated in
countries whose summers are more genial than our
own; witness the American apples and the
French and Jersey pears. To enjoy their crops,
it will not do to plant them out in the open fields.
We nurse them, by training them to walls. But
these peculiarities of constitution, which are the
stumbling-blocks to gardeners, are not the same
in all species of cultivated fruits; consequently,
a wall well adapted to the peculiarities of one
species, as the vine is, may be but imperfectly
adapted to those of others, as the peach and the
apricot are; else, why are those crops such
frequent failures? Whilst for others (especially for
that delicious fruit, the fresh ripe fig), a wall is
worse than useless. It inspires false confidence.

If the apricot could only be persuaded to
blossom a month later than it does, we might
have open orchards of apricot-trees, as we have
of pear and apple trees. Unfortunately, though
vegetation may be easily forced and hastened;
to keep it back beyond its appointed time, without
great injury, is next to impossible. There
are varieties of the Mirabelle plum (not first-
rate, but both pretty and early, and excellent
for the kitchen), which annually bloom profusely
in England, while the fruit itself is a positive
rarity, as it is not considered to deserve a wall.
A fair crop of greengages, away from walls, is
realised but three years out of seven, even
in the south of England; two years out of
seven in the midland counties; seldom or
never in Yorkshire. On walls, it is anything
but a certainty. The interval between Easter
and Whitsuntide is a bitter trial to the fructification
of stone-fruits. It is the period called
la lune rousse, the red moon, dreaded by
French gardeners and vine-growers. Cobbett,
observing its coincidence with the time of
flowering of the sloe, happily styled it “the
blackthorn winter.” It often persecutes the
trees with hail, sleet, snow, and severe morning
frosts: against which latter a wall affords no
protection in spring, although it helps the
ripening of the wood in autumn.

With fig-trees, on the other hand, it is winter
frosts that do the mischief, in consequence of
their peculiar growth and mode of bearing. On
the shores of the Mediterranean, and in all
warm climates where the winter is as good as
frostless, the fig-tree bears TWO good crops of
fruit, one in June and another in September.
Were our summers warmer than they are, our
winters remaining the same, the fig-tree would
still be unable to bear ONE crop with us:
because the first crop grows on the tender
midsummer and autumnal shoots of the previous
year, which are destroyed by our ordinary
winters, and the second crop on the spring
shoots of the current year, which our summers
are too short to ripen, and which constitute the
numerous little figs which we see pinched and
blackened by the autumnal frosts in almost
every English garden. Of what use is a wall
alone for the protection of either set of shoots?

Fig-trees with us, on walls, may bear, perhaps,
if their branches are detached in October, tied
together in bundles, and thickly swathed with
straw and hay-bands till the return of spring.
At Argenteuil, a village which largely supplies
the Paris markets, the branches of the trees are
bent to the ground, and covered with litter,
and even buried in earth, to save them from
being frozen. In the kitchen-garden of the
castle at Altenburg, Mr. Rivers observed some
fine half-standard fig-trees with very stout, clear
stems and round heads full of fruit, then
(August) nearly full grown. Aware of the
coldness of the climate, the thermometer often
descending many degrees below zero in winter,
so as to kill fig-trees in the open air, he inquired
of the gardener how they were managed. They
were taken up with their balls of earth and placed
in a cellar, where they remained till the first
week in May; they were then brought into the
kitchen-garden and planted in a row. He said
they always ripened one abundant crop of fruit
in September. Mr. Rivers has reason to believe
that standard figs, treated in this way, would
also ripen one crop in the neighbourhood of
London, so that every suburban garden might
boast of its fig-tree in summer. In the eastern
and southern counties they may be cultivated
after this manner with a certainty of success.

An Orchard House will give to the vine its
requisite warmer and drier summer; to the
peach, the nectarine, the apricot, the almond,
and the plum, a certain shelter from inclement
springs, while it ripens the wood for next
year's bearing. And, although fig-trees against
walls require protection from the frost—which
would otherwise destroy the young fruit—
yet under glass, with the mould perfectly dry,
and the shoots thoroughly ripened, they will be
uninjured by the most severe cold, and will give
one crop without help from fire-heat. A house
with fire-heat is necessary, if two crops in
the season are insisted on; but, in 1857, figs in
common Orchard Houses ripened two crops of
fruit in several instances.

But an Orchard House warmed by fire is not
what interests us at present; for it is little else
than the greenhouse or the hothouse with which
we have been acquainted ever since John
Evelyn's time. The real Orchard House of
Rivers is a rough, inexpensive glass shed, which
can be made up of old window-sashes and
boards, if you have no better materials at
command; it need not be particularly
airtight, for free ventilation is one of its absolute
conditions. Mr. Rivers gives several forms,
with their most eligible dimensions, and their
cost, from the homely Lean-to to the Large
Span-roofed, with two walks in it, between rows
of fruit-trees. The Lean-to house, being effectual,
is much better than no glass roofed house
at all; but even economical persons will make a
sacrifice to have the Small Span-roofed, for the
sake of its more complete appearance, its
pleasantness as a promenade, and its freer admission
of light and air. Although it will be wise to
follow Mr. Rivers's proportions as to breadth