For restocking old worn-out apple orchards, in Worcestershire at any
rate, there is nothing to equal plum-trees; they flourished amazingly
at Aldington, and soon made up for the lost apples; they appeared to
follow the principle that dictates the rotation of ordinary crops,
just as the leguminous plants alternate satisfactorily with the
graminaceous, or, as I have read that in Norway, where a fir forest
has been cut, birch will spring up automatically and take its place.
My predecessor always sold his plums on the trees for the buyer to
harvest, and I heard that when the former turned a flock of Dorset
ewes into one of these orchards, the buyer complained--the lower
branches being heavily laden, and within a few feet of the
ground--that he had watched, "Them old yows holding down bunches of
plums with their harns for t'others to eat." This I imagine was in the
nature of hyperbole, and not intended to be taken literally.
I had about forty cherry trees in one of my orchards, and among them a
very early kind of black cherry, as well as Black Bigarreaus, White
Heart and Elton Heart. The early ones made particularly good prices,
but when the French cherries began to be imported, being on the market
a week or two before ours they "took the keen edge off the demand,"
though wretched-looking things in comparison.
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