"Pruning" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the hazel will be the pruning. Here I should say above all things: "Keep the suckers away." Hazel bushes are naturally inclined to produce a great many suckers, which should be thoroughly removed as soon as they appear; it will stop when the plants grow older. Besides the suckers, all weak and unnecessary ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... the materials of poetry, but he was hardly a great poet. He improved his Pleasures of the Imagination in the subsequent editions, by pruning away a great many redundances of style and ornament. Armstrong is better, though he has not chosen a very exhilarating subject—The Art of Preserving Health. Churchill's Satires on the Scotch, and Characters of the Players, are as good as the subjects deserved—they are strong, ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... would grow anywhere—even at the seaside, where all trees lean from the sea—except the ash. Sea or no sea, it stands straight up. Even the oak will shave up on the side of the wind, but not the ash. And best of all, the ash bears pruning better than any other tree. Pruning! That is the great trial both for men and trees, mother. None of us like it, but the ash-tree ...
— The Measure of a Man • Amelia Edith Huddleston Barr
... day will come when these warlike tribes shall beat their spears into pruning-hooks, and their assagais into ploughshares, and shall learn war no more! The skill and cunning of their artificers shall be consecrated to the higher and nobler ends of civilization, and the noise of battle shall die amid the ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... pruning in the proper season, these unshapely bushes might become things of beauty, and not only look better, but will do better, if given a severe trimming in the spring. Hedges of Privet, Purple Barberry, and Japan Quince, ...
— Your Plants - Plain and Practical Directions for the Treatment of Tender - and Hardy Plants in the House and in the Garden • James Sheehan
... auditorium under the spell of its romance. Without an effort he endears to us the defects of his hero's Quixotic qualities, and makes his very deformity contribute to the triumph of his heroic panache. Even such of the poet's prolixities as survive a very careful pruning of the text are made to seem essential to the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 21, 1919. • Various
... ii. 12. For the meaning compare Cant. lix. 3: The voice of the turtle "is a sign that winter is past, proclaiming nevertheless that the time of pruning has come.... The voice, more like one who groans than one who sings, admonishes us of our pilgrimage." After Eugenius III. had visited Clairvaux St. Bernard wrote, "The voice of the turtle has been heard in our chapter. We had great joy ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor
... the property destroyed is their own and not to be replaced. When wars are no longer the usurer's opportunity, but the consumption of his wealth, Mammon himself will beg that swords may be beaten into plow-shares and spears into pruning-hooks. ...
— Usury - A Scriptural, Ethical and Economic View • Calvin Elliott
... in her vegetable gardens, and superintended the planting of the different seeds. When vegetables were ready for pulling, from time to time, all the Court ladies were supplied with a kind of small pruning fork and gathered in the crop. Her Majesty seemed to enjoy seeing us work in the fields, and when the fit seized her she would come along and help. In order to encourage us in this work, Her Majesty would ...
— Two Years in the Forbidden City • The Princess Der Ling
... reasserted her rights everywhere else in this abandoned spot, taking, apparently, a fierce delight in effacing all traces of man's labour. The fruit trees threw out irregular branches without fear of the pruning knife; the box, intended to form a narrow border to the curiously shaped flower-beds and grass-plots, had grown up unchecked into huge, bushy shrubs, while a great variety of sturdy weeds had usurped the places formerly devoted to choice plants and beautiful, fragrant ...
— Captain Fracasse • Theophile Gautier
... clean. Many of the coffee estates suffer considerably from insufficient labour. The effects of this are quickly visible on the trees. Artificial fertilization is useful, even necessary after a number of years, and so is careful pruning in order to keep the trees ...
— Across Unknown South America • Arnold Henry Savage Landor
... huntsman within point-blank shot of a noble stag, who is yet too much struck with his majesty of front and of antler to take aim at him. They were those of a fowler, who, levelling his gun at a magnificent eagle, is yet reluctant to use his advantage when he sees the noble sovereign of the birds pruning himself in proud defiance of whatever may be attempted against him. The heart of the Sub-Prior (bigoted as he was) relented, and he doubted if he ought to purchase, by a rigorous discharge of what he deemed his ...
— The Monastery • Sir Walter Scott
... you can top it—we were interested when this orchard was planted, in what would happen if the trees were planted and allowed to grow as a forest stand. So they were planted in six-by-six spacing. Of course, we got a lot of self-pruning and a lot of competition, as we would in forests by the trees growing up and competing with each other and reaching for height and light. Some of them died and some were so badly suppressed that they failed to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Incorporated 39th Annual Report - at Norris, Tenn. September 13-15 1948 • Various
... And the stone-work round it, bearing no other marks of waste than my pruning-hook and dagger ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, No. 327 - Vol. 53, January, 1843 • Various
... which need trimming, and those to be left alone. Most young people possessing a knife generally commence sundry manoeuvres on the first plant or tree within reach, and generally with very disastrous results. Trimming and pruning of all sorts should, therefore, be only done by practical hands, and then the life of the plant will ...
— Little Folks (Septemeber 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... safe where were stored the secret archives of his empire. And when he emerged he was a very penitent war lord, and like the Mikado of Japan he was set to work beating his sword-blades into ploughshares and pruning-hooks. ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... two more, and the shell and husk, which, in the last and germinating stage of the nut, are so hard that a knife will scarcely make any impression, spontaneously burst by some force within; and, henceforth, the hardy young plant thrives apace; and needing no culture, pruning, or attention of any sort, rapidly advances to maturity. In four or five years it bears; in twice as many more, it begins to lift its head among the groves, where, waxing strong, it flourishes ...
— Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas • Herman Melville
... and his wife, whose golden wedding was spent in the house they had built, and in the garden they had planted when they were bride and groom. His back was permanently bowed with constant weeding and pruning and planting and hoeing, and his hands and face were brown as the soil he cultivated. The "hot-glowing" crimson peonies, seedlings which the wife had sown in her youth, had become great shrubs, fifteen or twenty feet in circumference. The flowering shrubs were trees. ...
— Home Life in Colonial Days • Alice Morse Earle
... return, Gray went to Cambridge, where he led the life of a retired student, devoting himself to the ancient authors, to poetry, botany, architecture, and heraldry. He was fastidious as to his own productions, which were very few, and which he kept by him, pruning, altering, and polishing, for a long time before he would let them see the light. His lines entitled A Distant Prospect of Eton College appeared in 1742, and were ...
— English Literature, Considered as an Interpreter of English History - Designed as a Manual of Instruction • Henry Coppee
... their original language, uncicerorian as it may be; for he informs us, that some of those which had been formerly published in the different biographies of the hero, were so improved and beautified that it was difficult to recognise them. By proper clipping and pruning, altering some sentences and exchanging others, an ingenious editor might transmogriphy these simple epistles into the philippics of Junius; and therefore we derive complete satisfaction from the conviction, that, in this compilation, ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 350, December 1844 • Various
... Israel, I will save the world. Through my holiness the world shall be a Temple. Sin and evil and pain shall pass. Peace shall sit under her fig-tree, and swords shall be turned into pruning-hooks, and gladness and brotherhood shall run through all the earth, even as my Father declared unto Israel by the mouth of his prophet Hosea. Yea, I, even I, will allure her and bring her into the desert, and speak comfortably ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... happy savage, and the agreeable simplicity of country people, appear to very great advantage when contrasted on this side with the often unlimited narrowness of a special trade, and the endless curtailing of the wholeness of man by the pruning processes of city life. Thus the often abused savage has his hut, his family, his cocoa tree, his weapons, his passions; he fishes, hunts, plays, fights, adorns himself, and enjoys the consciousness that he is the centre of a ...
— Pedagogics as a System • Karl Rosenkranz
... brass Source of sympathetic tears South, o'er my ear like the sweet Sow, wrong, by the ear Soweth, shall reap, as he Space and time annihilate Spare the rod Sparks fly upward Sparrow, caters for the —, providence in the fall of a —, fall, or hero perish Speak of me as I am Spears into pruning-hooks Speculation in those eyes Speech, thought deeper than Speed the going guest —the parting guest Spenser, renowned Spin, nor toil not Spirit wounded —, haughty —return unto God —indeed is willing —, present ...
— Familiar Quotations • Various
... homespun cloth, which he bestowed on himself for working days. His whole family was a housekeeper something turned of forty, a niece not twenty, and a man that served him in the house and in the field, and could saddle a horse, and handle the pruning hook. The master himself was nigh fifty years of age, of a hale and strong complexion, lean-bodied and thin-faced, an early riser, and a lover of hunting. Some say his surname was Quixada, or Quesada (for authors differ in this particular); ...
— The Children's Hour, v 5. Stories From Seven Old Favorites • Eva March Tappan
... time the peasants gathering twigs, and the blue-bloused gendarmes guarding the woods and the fences skirting them. "Nothing is allowed to go to waste in this country," he said. "It looks as though they went over it once a month with a lawn-mower and a pruning-knife. I believe they number the trees ...
— The Princess Aline • Richard Harding Davis
... penknife, whittle, razor, razor blade, safety razor, straight razor, electric razor; scalpel; bistoury[obs3], lancet; plowshare, coulter, colter[obs3]; hatchet, ax, pickax, mattock, pick, adze, gill; billhook, cleaver, cutter; scythe, sickle; scissors, shears, pruning shears, cutters, wire cutters, nail clipper, paper cutter; sword &c. (arms) 727; bodkin &c. (perforator) 262; belduque[obs3], bowie knife[obs3], paring knife; bushwhacker [U.S.]; drawing knife, drawing shave; microtome[Microbiol]; chisel, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... the wretched multitudes of the Abyss. The New Republicans will constitute an informal and open freemasonry. In all sorts of ways they will be influencing and controlling the apparatus of the ostensible governments, they will be pruning irresponsible property, checking speculators and controlling the abyssward drift, but at that, at an indirect control, at any sort of fiction, the New Republic, from the very nature of its cardinal ideas, will not rest. The clearest and simplest ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... thine: Thou art an Elme my husband, I a Vine: Whose weaknesse married to thy stranger state, Makes me with thy strength to communicate: If ought possesse thee from me, it is drosse, Vsurping Iuie, Brier, or idle Mosse, Who all for want of pruning, with intrusion, Infect thy sap, and liue on ...
— The First Folio [35 Plays] • William Shakespeare
... sideways. Great, thick necks hulked forward in impatient jerks; and those dagger-pointed horns, sharper than a pruning hook, promised no boy's sport for our company. The buffalo sees best laterally on the level, and as long as we were quiet we remained undiscovered. At the prospect, some of the hunters grew excitedly profane. Others were ...
— Lords of the North • A. C. Laut
... must do all this with due delicacy and tact. If he takes advantage of his position to exercise his censoriousness upon us we speedily vote him a bore, and take measures to get rid of him. But when done with gentleness and good nature, and with an eye single to our real good, this pruning of the tendrils of our inner life is one of the most precious offices ...
— Practical Ethics • William DeWitt Hyde
... interrupted Nello. "I know what you would say. It is the bella zazzera—the hyacinthine locks, you do not choose to part with; and there is no need. Just a little pruning—ecco!—and you will look not unlike the illustrious prince Pico di Mirandola in his prime. And here we are in good time in the Piazza San Giovanni, and at the door of my shop. But you are pausing, I see: naturally, you want to look at our wonder of the world, our Duomo, our Santa Maria del Fiore. ...
— Romola • George Eliot
... of Excise had seriously thought of prosecuting him. The counties which the new impost particularly affected had always been Tory counties. It was the boast of John Philips, the poet of the English vintage, that the cider-land had ever been faithful to the throne, and that all the pruning-hooks of her thousand orchards had been beaten into swords for the service of the ill-fated Stuarts. The effect of Bute's fiscal scheme was to produce an union between the gentry and yeomanry of the cider-land and the Whigs ...
— Critical and Historical Essays, Volume III (of 3) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... disciplining one's thoughts like a regiment, and of studying the art of putting each soldier into his right place, may have gradually taught me to think necessary. I hope, when you see it in print, you will not be alarmed by my use of the pruning-knife. I have tried to exercise it with the utmost delicacy and discretion, and to suggest to you, especially towards the end, how this sort of writing (regard being had to the size of the journal in which it ...
— The Letters of Charles Dickens - Vol. 1 (of 3), 1833-1856 • Charles Dickens
... from the lane behind his father's house. He could hear the cocks crowing in Surrey, and the lowing of the kine. There was a robin singing in a bush under the window, and there was some one in the garden with a pair of pruning-shears. Snip-snip! snip-snip! he heard them going. The light in the east was pink as a peach-bloom and ...
— Master Skylark • John Bennett
... irony. But she did condescend. Lady Camper came to his gate unexpectedly, rang the bell, and was let in like an ordinary visitor. It happened that the General was gardening—not the pretty occupation of pruning—he was digging—and of necessity his coat was off, and he was hot, dusty, unpresentable. From adoring earth as the mother of roses, you may pass into a lady's presence without purification; you cannot (or so the General thought) when you are caught in the act of adoring the mother of cabbages. ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... the good done by insects. They undoubtedly tend by their attacks to prevent an undue growth of vegetation. The pruning done to a tree or herb by certain insects undoubtedly causes a more healthy growth of the branches and leaves, and ultimately a greater production fruit. Again, as pollen-bearers, insects are a most powerful agency in nature. It is undoubtedly the fact that the presence, ...
— Our Common Insects - A Popular Account of the Insects of Our Fields, Forests, - Gardens and Houses • Alpheus Spring Packard
... Jesus Christ, who is that powerful Spirit of Love, is the Head Leveller: and as He is lifted up, He will draw all men after Him, and leave you naked and bare.... This Great Leveller, Christ our King of Righteousness in us, shall cause men to beat their swords into plough-shares, their spears into pruning-hooks, and Nations shall learn war no more. Everyone shall delight to let each other enjoy the pleasures of the Earth, and shall hold each other no more in bondage. Then what will become of your power? Truly he must be cast out as a murderer. I pity you for the torment your spirit must ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... active service, resume their importance with a month or two of quiet. It really costs unceasing labor to keep a regiment in perfect condition and ready for service. The work is made up of minute and endless details, like a bird's pruning her feathers or a cat's licking her kittens into their proper toilet. Here are eight hundred men, every one of whom, every Sunday morning at farthest, must be perfectly soigne in all personal proprieties; he must exhibit himself provided ...
— Army Life in a Black Regiment • Thomas Wentworth Higginson
... Bourgeois guards before and behind. About sixty thousand citizens, of all forms and conditions, armed with the conquests of the Bastile and Invalids, as far as they would go, the rest with pistols, swords, pikes, pruning hooks, scythes, &c. lined all the streets through which the procession passed, and with the crowds of people in the streets, doors, and windows, saluted them everywhere with the cries of 'Vive la Nation,' but ...
— Memoir, Correspondence, And Miscellanies, From The Papers Of Thomas Jefferson - Volume I • Thomas Jefferson
... ankle band-ages. In the angle is an octagonal shaft of green marble which continues round the arch. The reliefs on Eve's side in the next order show details of burgher life and agriculture, probably labours of the months or seasons—pruning leafless trees, the preparation of leather, a man seated by a fire on which is a cauldron, whilst a woman fills his cup from a skin over her shoulder, behind hang sausages. Above is a pig which a man is about to kill. The other side is similar. Above are shepherds ...
— The Shores of the Adriatic - The Austrian Side, The Kuestenlande, Istria, and Dalmatia • F. Hamilton Jackson
... and the constable on the other. "Must I go?" cried he, in accents of despair. They told him he must. "And alone?" said he. "Yes, you must," was the stern reply. The carriage was open to receive him, and they would have pushed him in, but he suddenly took a pruning knife from his pocket, and drew it three times across his throat with such force that it severed the jugular vein instantly, and he fell ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... or norm for art, which is only imperfectly realized in many works. There are few novels which would be seriously damaged by the omission of whole chapters, and many a rambling essay in good standing would permit pruning without injury, unless indeed we are made to feel that the apparently dispensable material really contributes something of fullness and exuberance, and so is not superfluous, after all. The unity in some forms of art is tighter than in others; in a play closer ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... In regard to pruning I find the best and largest fruit is produced on canes not over four years old, and if judicious cutting out of the old canes is followed nice, large, full clusters of fruit of excellent character will be ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... made him reject every superfluous thing which his vast imagination could offer, and to retain only what was necessary and useful. Judgment guided the hand of this admirable gardener, and was the pruning hook he employed to ...
— The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753),Vol. V. • Theophilus Cibber
... grammarians, will exercise their elaborate and often tiresome ingenuity. Binding down an heroic or dramatic poet to the block upon which they have previously dissected his words and sentences, they proceed to use the axe and the pruning knife by wholesale; and, inconsistent in everything but their wish to make out a case of unlawful affiliation, they cut out book after book, passage after passage, till the author is reduced to a collection of fragments, or till those who fancied they possessed the works of some great ...
— The Odyssey of Homer • Homer, translated by Alexander Pope
... queer shape so long imposed upon it; but the outline would not be altered for a considerable time, as the new leafage would at first unfold only in the direction of least resistance: that is to say, within limits originally established by the shears and the pruning-knife. By sword and law the old Japanese society had been pruned and clipped, bent and bound, just like such a tree; and after the reconstructions of the Meiji period,—after the abolition of the daimiates, and the suppression of the military class, ...
— Japan: An Attempt at Interpretation • Lafcadio Hearn
... condition of Austria. The great object of this able financier is to cut down the expenses of the empire. No doubt that it would be unwise for Austria, an inland state, to reduce her military expenses; but the viel-schreiberei might be diminished, and the pruning-hook might safety be applied to the bureaucracy; but a powerful under-current places this region beyond the power of Baron Kubeck. He is also a free-trader; but here again he meets with a powerful opposition: ...
— Servia, Youngest Member of the European Family • Andrew Archibald Paton
... much more yesterday to help with the pruning of the rose-vines than I do to-day, Matthew," I answered with a laugh. Matthew's proposals of marriage are so regular and so alike that I have to avoid monotony in ...
— The Golden Bird • Maria Thompson Daviess
... Uncle Sebastian chose to pick up a redwood splinter on which to whittle. He took out a slick-handled jackknife, blew a clot of pocket lint from the springs, opened a whetted pruning blade, and began shaving the brittle wood. His watery blue eyes were far-off ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... kind invitation, And much bustle it caused in the plumed creation; Such ruffling of feathers, such pruning of coats, Such chirping, such whistling, such clearing of throats, Such polishing bills, and such oiling of pinions, Had never been known in the biped dominions. Peacock ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... disclosed by one of his own opinions. Corrupted ere yet he had left his home, whilst in age a boy, there is, however, the comfort of reflecting that he outlived his vices. Fox, with a green apron tied around his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit-trees at St. Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career recurs ...
— Beaux and Belles of England • Mary Robinson
... creates another. One foothold secured in a missionary region opens districts to many who swell the cry of need to the heart of Christian compassion "come over and help us," so that with all our pruning the work has grown beyond the slight increase of funds ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., May, 1888., No. 5 • Various
... afterwards that there was another reason, viz., that it was unlucky to break off even a small twig from a bourtree bush. In some parts of the Continent this superstitious feeling is so strong that, before pruning it, the gardener says—"Elder, elder, may I cut thy branches?" If no response be heard, it is considered that assent has been given, and then, after spitting three times, the pruner begins his cutting. According to Montanus, elder wood formed a portion of the fuel used in the burning of human bodies ...
— Folk Lore - Superstitious Beliefs in the West of Scotland within This Century • James Napier
... than all the princes in Christendom, and that valuable member of society is himself, Gulielmus Temple, Baronettus. One sees him in his retreat; between his study-chair and his tulip-beds, clipping his apricots and pruning his essays,—the statesman, the ambassador no more; but the philosopher, the Epicurean, the fine gentleman and courtier at St. James's as at Shene; where in place of kings and fair ladies, he pays his court to the Ciceronian ...
— Harvard Classics Volume 28 - Essays English and American • Various
... far to the north AEbutius, The Master of the Knights, Gave Tubero of Norba To feed the Porcian kites. Next under those red horse-hoofs Flaccus of Setia lay; Better had he been pruning Among his elms that day. Mamilus saw the slaughter, And tossed his golden crest, And towards the Master of the Knights Through the thick battle pressed. AEbutius smote Mamilius So fiercely on the shield That the great lord of Tusculum ...
— Lays of Ancient Rome • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... written, with the view of ascertaining how many words they can eliminate without diminishing the force of what has been written. An article or two from the daily paper, and an occasional page from some recent work of fiction will afford further opportunity for profitable practice in pruning. ...
— Slips of Speech • John H. Bechtel
... different showing. It was one of the surprising things, in a statistical way, to find that city-bred boys stood the marching and exposure of the Civil War campaigns better than their country brothers, and that the yard-stick turned into as effective a sword as the pruning-hook. Garrison, who maintained for so many years that men should not vote because the government was founded on force, had the grace not to speak on this phase of the question, but he said it was cruel that women should be disfranchised and classed with paupers, idiots, and criminals. Senator ...
— Woman and the Republic • Helen Kendrick Johnson
... Boers, with the exception of the Commandant-General, were the same men who ruled the country in times of peace. War suddenly transformed pruning-hooks into swords, and conservators of peace into leaders of armies. The head of the army was the Commandant-General, who was invested with full power to direct ...
— With the Boer Forces • Howard C. Hillegas
... was now passing, he observed, had been planted in winter wheat, and that just beyond, at the edge of the meadow, was the young orchard well grown and badly in need of pruning. The route he had taken soon brought him out into the lane at the foot of the hill, near the cider mill, where he stopped to drink of the cool sap that flowed into a large tin pail, from one of the sugar-maple ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel experience. They become less nervous, but more sympathetic. They have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain and disease in the light of science. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... let me go look for my past life, and raise myself up from this present death. I was not born to be a governor or protect islands or cities from the enemies that choose to attack them. Ploughing and digging, vinedressing and pruning, are more in my way than defending provinces or kingdoms. 'Saint Peter is very well at Rome; I mean each of us is best following the trade he was born to. A reaping-hook fits my hand better than a governor's sceptre; I'd rather have my fill of gazpacho' than be subject to the ...
— Don Quixote • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... and in each case I had special reasons for hope and longing that the sermon might bring some spiritual help. Instinctively, I avoided every expression which could in the least complicate my English and thus obscure the message to my foreign friends. And so thankful was I for the pruning of periods that resulted, that I am much disposed, in all future preaching, to put mentally before me those same ...
— To My Younger Brethren - Chapters on Pastoral Life and Work • Handley C. G. Moule
... his pruning knives and scissors which he had let fall, and stalked down the path. What was it? he wondered. She was a princess in all things save her lack of coldness toward the people. It was wrong to meet them in this way, it was not in order. Her highness had lived too long among them. She would never ...
— The Goose Girl • Harold MacGrath
... he to himself, in this thick wood, did I not see alleys trimmed with the shears, trees shaped by the pruning-knife? ...
— The Solitary of Juan Fernandez, or The Real Robinson Crusoe • Joseph Xavier Saintine
... combatted by fertilizing, mulching, providing necessary water in time of drought and avoidance of any condition that might weaken the tree. All dead twigs and all twigs showing fruiting bodies of the fungus should be pruned off some distance below the apparent infection as soon as discovered and the pruning wounds painted. Dr. Graves thinks it possible that butternuts grafted on black walnut stocks may have their vigor increased sufficiently to help in warding off the disease. Mr. Weschcke says that, although the Melanconis disease is prevalent in his locality, there has never been the slightest indication ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Thirty-Fourth Annual Report 1943 • Various
... never amounts to much; and such taking in hand was all that Charlotte had as yet attempted. In a little passion of self-reproach and mortification, she occasionally lopped off ugly shoots; but the root was still vigorous and lusty, and only grew the better for its petty pruning. Richard looked very much displeased at his brother's rudeness, and tried to make up for it by ...
— Richard Vandermarck • Miriam Coles Harris
... like what we call pleasure in ourselves? Does the water-lily, rocking in her triple bath of water, air, and light, relish in no wise her own beauty? When the plant in our room turns to the light, closes her blossoms in the dark, responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom, who has the right to say she does not feel, or that she plays a purely passive part? Truly plants can foresee nothing, neither the scythe of the mower, nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers. They ...
— A Pluralistic Universe - Hibbert Lectures at Manchester College on the - Present Situation in Philosophy • William James
... is of it." And then she laughed a little. "That miserable O'mie came up here the day after we went to Red Range and persuaded mother to cut it all down except one straight stick of a bush. He told her it was dying, and that it needed pruning, and I don't know what. And you know mother. I was over at the Anderson's, and when I came home the whole clump was gone. I dreamed the other night that somebody was hiding in there. It was all dead in the middle. Do you remember when we ...
— The Price of the Prairie - A Story of Kansas • Margaret Hill McCarter
... we are told of the glad day, which we are now trying to hasten, when swords shall be beaten into ploughshares, and spears into pruning-hooks—when nations shall not lift up the sword against nations or learn war ...
— In His Image • William Jennings Bryan
... about the Queen of the Laestrygones—'She was tall as a mountain, and they hated her'—would have seemed to them most reasonable.... To read Greek is to have a perpetual witness to the virtue of pruning—of condensing—a perpetual protest against all that crowds, and swells, and weakens the writer's purpose. To forget this is but to 'confound our skill in covetousness.' We cannot all be writers ... but we all wish to have good taste, and good taste is born of a generous caution ...
— On The Art of Reading • Arthur Quiller-Couch
... from his brief and clouded holiday to his work in that corner of the great vineyard, so overcrowded with busy husbandmen that they were always plucking up each others' plants, and pruning and repruning each others' vines, till they made a wilderness where there should have been a harvest, he found that his special plot there had suffered much damage. John Nixey, following up the impression he had so successfully made, had spread ...
— Cobwebs and Cables • Hesba Stretton
... will of God and the requirements of his law, expect that the blessing of obedient and sanctified children will crown their days. Let not those who suffer their children to grow up around them like weeds, without religious culture or pruning, who demand no obedience, who command no reverence, who offer no earnest, ceaseless prayer, let them not suppose that the blessing of the God who spoke from Horeb will come upon their families. "He is in one mind and who ...
— Mrs Whittelsey's Magazine for Mothers and Daughters - Volume 3 • Various
... family. And the peculiarity of the situation is that the farm or garden, whichever it is called, will give agreeable and most healthful occupation to all the boys and girls in the family all the days in the year that can be spared from the school. Aside from the ploughing, the labor is light. Pruning, grafting, budding, the picking of the grapes, the gathering of the fruit from the trees, the sorting, packing, and canning, are labor for light and deft hands, and labor distributed through the year. The harvest, of one sort and another, ...
— Our Italy • Charles Dudley Warner
... also attempted with persistent study to master the Changes, to which incomprehensible work he added features of his own—very little more understandable than the original texts. As to the Odes, 3000 in number, he used the pruning knife much more vigorously, and nine-tenths of them were rejected as unsuitable for the purposes of good didactic lessons or conservative precedents. If we substitute, as we are entitled to do, the vague word "religion" for the ...
— Ancient China Simplified • Edward Harper Parker
... which comes from schoolbooks, I think that he was better informed than the average Frenchman of his class; but I should say that he had thought less; that his mind was more of a hot- house product of a skilful nurseryman's hand, who knew the value of training and feeding and pruning the plant if you were to make it yield well. A kindly, willing, likable boy, peculiarly simple and unspoiled, it seemed a pity that all his life he should have to bear the brand of the Lusitania on his brow; that event which history ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... surrender of Sumter and the excited week that witnessed "the uprising of the North,"—Joel iii., v. 9: "Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles: Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all men of war draw near; let them come up. Beat your ploughshares into swords, and your pruning-hooks into spears; let the weak say, I am strong." I was not in the country myself at that time, and my attention was first drawn to this in 1865 by a clergyman, who told me of his startled astonishment upon opening the Book. In the then public temper it must have thrilled ...
— From Sail to Steam, Recollections of Naval Life • Captain A. T. Mahan
... rosebush or two, and a couple of scraggy altheas. Workmen had been about the place for some time, putting everything in order, and of course we took the liveliest interest in all that went on, from the pruning of the shrubs to the carrying in of the furniture; and the day the new people moved in, Miss Marston could hardly keep us younger ones from the windows: indeed, for that matter, Nora was just as curious as we were, for all she ...
— We Ten - Or, The Story of the Roses • Lyda Farrington Kraus
... blackberries—Burbank's, he lives at Santa Rosa—Loganberries, Mammoth berries. But don't fool with strawberries. That's a whole occupation in itself. They're not vines, you know. I've examined the orchard. It's a good foundation. We'll settle the pruning and grafts later." ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... Gentiles ["the nations," R.V.]: Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruning hooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong.... Let the heathen be wakened.... Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision [or "cutting off"]: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision." Joel ...
— Our Day - In the Light of Prophecy • W. A. Spicer
... Green had a bowl of wine in his hand. He stood up and said: "Here, now, I call a health to the wrights of Kent who be turning our plough-shares into swords and our pruning-hooks into spears! Drink around, ...
— A Dream of John Ball, A King's Lesson • William Morris
... things in a young writer which yet, if he continue in, I cannot but justly hate him for the same. There is a time to be given all things for maturity, and that even your country husband-man can teach, who to a young plant will not put the pruning-knife, because it seems to fear the iron, as not able to admit the scar. No more would I tell a green writer all his faults, lest I should make him grieve and faint, and at last despair; for nothing doth more hurt than to make him so afraid of all things as he can endeavour nothing. ...
— Discoveries and Some Poems • Ben Jonson
... were a little behind the times in some ways; they had never thought fit to curl their hair en garcon, or to mount a pyramid of tangled curls in imitation of a poodle; no pruning scissors had touched the light-springing locks that grew so prettily about their temples; in this, as in much else, they were unlike other girls, for they dared to put individuality before fashion, and good taste and a sense of beauty against the ...
— Not Like Other Girls • Rosa N. Carey
... my evening clothes from a man of the name of Attenborough, whom I employ to take care of them when they are not likely to be wanted; found a white shirt, which looked presentable after a little pruning of the cuffs with a razor; and drove to the Gunton-Cresswells's in ...
— Not George Washington - An Autobiographical Novel • P. G. Wodehouse
... been the first to send out a whaler from Havre, and had secured almost a monopoly of the oil-trade. Some years afterwards I made a passage with his brother, and learned from him the history of this Yankee enterprise, which had filled two capacious purses, and substituted the harpoon for the pruning-knife, the whale-ship for the olive-orchard, in the very stronghold of the emblem of peace; and now the collier with his pickaxe has driven them both from the field. But the Petit Hotel Montmorenci did not wait for the ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 8, No. 50, December, 1861 • Various
... necessary mulched with half rotten manure. After the layers are well rooted, they should be taken up, cut apart and properly trimmed and planted in the nursery row, where they remain until large enough for market or orchard planting. There is but very little pruning of the young hazel-plants necessary until they are planted in the orchard. I will therefore not dwell on the subject of pruning just now, but will leave the propagating and growing of the hazel or filbert-plants in the nursery and try to make a few remarks about the hazel or filbert orchard. ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting - Washington, D. C. October 7 AND 8, 1920 • Various
... volume on World Policing and the Constitution[416] Mr. James Grafton Rogers lists 149 episodes similar to the Greytown affair, stretching between the undeclared war with France in 1798 and Pearl Harbor. While inviting some pruning, the list demonstrates beyond peradventure the existence in the President, as Chief Executive and Commander in Chief, of power to judge whether a situation requires the use of available forces to protect American ...
— The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation • Edward Corwin
... We had left behind us a blooming spring, which enlivened with its verdure the trees and hedges on the road we passed, and the meadows already smiled with flowers. The cheerful inhabitants were busy in adjusting their limits, lopping their trees, pruning their vines, tilling their fields: but when we entered Savoy, nature wore a very different face; and I must own, that my spirits were great sufferers by the change. Here we began to view on the nearer mountains, covered with ice and snow, notwithstanding the advanced season, ...
— The History of Sir Charles Grandison, Volume 4 (of 7) • Samuel Richardson
... sauce, here or at Sans Souci, what you may perhaps whisper to Charlotte[17] or Annie in the boscages or the bathing-house. Forgive me for being so admonitory, but after your last letter I have to take the diplomatic pruning-knife in hand a bit. Do not write me anything that the police may not read and communicate to King, ministers, or Rochow. If the Austrians and many other folks can succeed in sowing distrust in our camp, they will thereby attain one of the principal objects ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X. • Kuno Francke
... and the companies bound to Canada and Nova Scotia are lured by tales of summer suns, that ripen grapes in December. No word of war is breathed; hushed is the clang of arms in these announcements; and the sanguine recruit is almost tempted to expect that pruning-hooks, instead of swords, will be the ...
— Redburn. His First Voyage • Herman Melville
... They rose every morning at five, had a slice of bread and a cup of milk, and were off to the gardener's, where they worked hard until half-past eight. Mr. Hardy had requested that they should be specially instructed in the raising of vegetables, and in the planting and pruning of fruit-trees. The culture of flowers could be of no utility. The digging made the boys' backs ache at first, and blistered their hands, but they stuck to it manfully, and soon became accustomed to the work, returning to breakfast with ...
— On the Pampas • G. A. Henty
... to know all this? Why, through being under-gardener. Of course he couldn't be under-gardener, and be always about, in the summer-time, near the windows on the lawn, a mowing, and sweeping, and weeding, and pruning, and this and that, without getting acquainted with the ways of the family. Even supposing Master Harry hadn't come to him one morning early, and said, "Cobbs, how should you spell Norah, if you was asked?" and then began cutting it in ...
— The Holly-Tree • Charles Dickens
... continue the march, command and countermand; meantime interluding with loving thought this afterpiece of battle. Supported, cheered, I take my [5] pen and pruning-hook, to "learn war no more," and with strong wing to lift my readers above the smoke of ...
— Miscellaneous Writings, 1883-1896 • Mary Baker Eddy
... chance, went near it. But as a lover the lordly fellow was most gallant and ardent. While his mate was on the nest laying, he was usually to be seen floating on the open mere beyond the reed-fringe, pruning his plumage in the cold pink rays of the first of ...
— The Backwoodsmen • Charles G. D. Roberts
... table, and so excited another's curiosity. 'What is it?' a second and still older lady asked. 'A colonial butter knife,' the Spectator replied with an air of much antiquarian lore. 'A butter knife! No such thing. My grandfather had one just like this, and it's a pruning knife. He wouldn't use a steel knife because it poisoned the sap.' What next? Paper knife, butter knife, and pruning knife! At all events every new name added a dollar to its value, and the Spectator wondered what the crowd would say, for now it was in the auctioneer's ...
— Adopting An Abandoned Farm • Kate Sanborn
... the blood of man shed by his fellow man; the sun shall rise in the East and set in the West and shed his light across this little globe; and nowhere shall he see man crushed by his fellows. And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. And instead of the thorn shall come up the fir-tree; and instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree: and man shall nowhere crush man on all the holy earth. Tomorrow's sun shall rise," ...
— Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland • Olive Schreiner
... never better than after harvest, when they are heavy-laden with their pale green hedgehog-like fruit and alive with people swarming among their branches, pruning them while the leaves are still good winter food for cattle. Why, I wonder, is there such an especial charm about the pruning of trees? Who does not feel it? No matter what the tree is, the poplar of France, or the brookside willow or oak coppice of England, or the chestnuts ...
— Alps and Sanctuaries of Piedmont and the Canton Ticino • Samuel Butler
... happy days in the grey vista of a life; away in the cliffs yonder, the rock-doves were preparing to nest by hundreds, and waking the silence with their cooing and the flutter of their wings. Even the grim old eagle perched on the pinnacle of the peak was pruning himself, contentedly happy in the knowledge that his mate had laid an egg in that dark corner of the cliff. All things rejoiced and cried aloud that summer was at hand and that it was time to bloom and love ...
— Jess • H. Rider Haggard
... to Master Potts's account. If the crop of each of these was over abundant, it was from no fault of the learned judges, who, in their commissions of Oyer and Terminer, subjected it pretty liberally to the pruning-hook ...
— Discovery of Witches - The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster • Thomas Potts
... to cast an inquisitive look over his garden palings. They saw him dressed in a linen jacket, with the glorious ribbon adorning his button-hole, weeding his flower-garden, turning up his walks, pruning his trees, clearing his flowers of caterpillars, watering his borders, with great drops of sweat pouring down, bending over his labour like a negro under ...
— The Grip of Desire • Hector France
... outlived his vices which seem to have "cropped out" by his ancestral connection in the female line with the reprobate Charles II., whom he was thought to resemble in features. Fox, afterwards, with a green apron tied round his waist, pruning and nailing up his fruit trees at St Ann's Hill, or amusing himself innocently with a few friends, is a pleasing object to remember, even whilst his early career occurs forcibly to ...
— The Gaming Table: Its Votaries and Victims - Volume I (of II) • Andrew Steinmetz
... in orchards, or espaliers, or against walls, require attention, in planting, pruning, or other management, almost every month in the year, to render them productive, and to preserve the fruit in a good state.—JANUARY. Cut out dead wood and irregular branches, clean the stumps and boughs from the ...
— The Cook and Housekeeper's Complete and Universal Dictionary; Including a System of Modern Cookery, in all Its Various Branches, • Mary Eaton
... prunes the vine that it may bring forth more fruit. He cuts off useless branches that others may replace them, stronger and fresher; and the pruning is to be forgotten in the ripening clusters that are gathered in consequence of it. The gold is refined that the alloy may be disengaged from union with the precious metal; and when the latter is purified, its worth far exceeds the trial through which it had to pass. And who ...
— Joy in Service; Forgetting, and Pressing Onward; Until the Day Dawn • George Tybout Purves
... you from Mr. Pulham this morning, and that gave a fillip to my Laziness, which has been intolerable. But I am so taken up with pruning and gardening, quite a new sort of occupation to me. I have gather'd my Jargonels, but my Windsor Pears are backward. The former were of exquisite raciness. I do now sit under my own vine, and contemplate ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... red dots which represent the dominant power of England in every portion of the world. The smallest island may become the most impregnable and important coaling-depot. It is the fashion for some modern reformers (happily few) to suggest a curtailment of the British Empire, on the principle that "by pruning we should improve the strength of the national tree." If there are rotten boughs, or exhausting and useless shoots, the analogy might be practical; but if we examine carefully a map of the world it would puzzle the Royal Geographical Society to ...
— Cyprus, as I Saw it in 1879 • Sir Samuel W. Baker |
