II. BOTANICAL AND HORTICULTURAL CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE PEACH
PLACE OF THE PEACH IN THE GENUS PRUNUS
The genus Prunus is without peer in the number of distinct, natural, esculent products it furnishes man. Here belong the stone-fruits--peaches, plums, cherries, almonds and apricots, represented by some forty edible species, which, through long domestication, have been broken up into not less than 5000 orchard-varieties, of which at least 3000 are now under cultivation. Of the two-score cultivated species of this genus, Prunus persica, the common peach, is easily the most remarkable when judged either by the senses which make foods palatable and pleasant or by the criteria that establish the commercial worth of a product. As virtues which give the peach leading place among stone-fruits, we may specify: Wider distribution and consequently commoner cultivation and a greater number of varieties; larger size, greater beauty, pleasanter and more diversified taste, and more culinary uses than other stone-fruits; and greater productiveness, more rapid growth and earlier fruiting of the trees than most of the species of the genus. The place of the peach in the genus Prunus is thus easily established from a horticultural point of view, but it is a much more difficult matter to make clear its botanical standing among the species with which it is considered botanically related.
The botanical relations of the several stone-fruits to each other have been set forth in the foregoing books of this series on plums and cherries, but, for the convenience of those who may not have these treatises, a summary of the relationships of the species of Prunus is presented. Besides, greater emphasis on several differences between the peach and its congeners is needed. In particular, since some notable naturalists have held that the peach is a modified almond, the differences between these two fruits must be more clearly set forth.
Nearly every botanist who has done much towards classifying plants has grouped the stone-fruits according to a plan of his own and there are, therefore, many classification schemes and consequently a most confused nomenclature for this genus. Happily, the pitfalls in synonomy dug by botanists need not worry horticulturists; for each of the stone-fruits constitutes a distinct horticultural group. In tree or fruit of peach, plum, cherry, apricot, or almond, who could mistake one for another? For horticultural purposes we accept as best one of the oldest and yet one of the most commonly used classifications which places in one genus all of the stone-fruits. What are the lines of cleavage between the several stone-fruits of common cultivation?
Stone-fruits fall naturally into two distinct groups. In the first the leaves are rolled in the buds--convolute. The plums and the apricots belong to this section. In the buds of the other group the leaves are folded lengthwise along the midrib--conduplicate. To this section belong almonds, peaches and cherries. The two sections seem to be united in this matter of disposition of leaves in the bud, it should be said in passing, by a few species of American plums which are conduplicate in vernation. The second section is further subdivided by very marked differences in the fruits. The fruits of the peach and almond are larger than those of the cherry, less juicy,--in the case of the almond almost dry,--hirsute (except in the nectarine), and are borne without stems; and the blossoms usually appear long before the opening of the leaves. Cherry-fruits are always juicy, usually glabrous, and are borne on more or less distinct stems; and the blossoms appear with the leaves. Botanists who put these fruits in one genus usually redivide according to the characters given so that the plum and apricot stand in one sub-genus (Euprunus), the almond and peach in another (Amygdalus), and the cherry in a third (Cerasus).
Differentiating more closely, we find that it is not so easy to distinguish between the peach and the almond. The likenesses are so many and so apparent that it is not to be wondered that Knight, whose theory we have discussed on a foregoing page, came to the conclusion that the peach is a modified almond, or that Darwin, with his belief that plants came sooner or later to express their environmental conditions, should be inclined to believe that the peach is an evolution from the almond. It is easy to imagine that countless ages ago--how long since is but an invitation to argue--the two species merged into one. Offspring of the parent-species once established in distinct soil and climatic conditions--the peach in China, the almond in southwestern Asia--differentiation began and in time each region was represented by a species of its own. Such an occurrence is but one of the commonplaces of evolution; but Knight, Lindley and Darwin thought they saw evidence that the separation came after the almond, the supposed parent-species, had been domesticated, the steps being from fleshy almond to bad clingstone, to good clingstone, to freestone, to nectarine. The arguments against such a descent have been given elsewhere.
The chief differences between the two species are to be found in the matured fruits though, at first thought, it might appear that these are not greater than those found in widely separated varieties of either of the two species. The fruits of the peach and the almond are, however, much more widely separated than any of the varieties of either species, inasmuch as the differences are several and have to do with parts not usually affected by cultivation and not the subject of selection by the cultivator. Thus, the fruit of the peach is a delectable esculent; that of the almond inedible; the flesh of the peach, the mesocarp, is soft, fleshy, juicy; that of the almond thin, tough and leathery; the pit of the peach must be removed while that of the almond drops naturally from the hard flesh which splits at maturity. The differences between the pits of the two species are quite as marked as in the flesh of the fruit. The pit of the peach is deeply sculptured, pitted, and of a bone-like consistency; that of the almond is nearly smooth and in most varieties is much thinner and of softer texture. The differences in the kernels are such as could easily be brought about by selection, some peach-kernels being sweet and edible and some almond-kernels being too bitter to be palatable.
Coming to the tree-characters we find that there are several which differ sufficiently to give each of the two fruits distinct specific rank. The winter aspect of the two trees is wholly different. The almond resembles a young apple tree in color of bark more than it does the peach and has, too, a head much like that of a broad-topped, much-branched apple. In foliage the distant aspect is much the same, but examined closely there are several distinctions that hold in comparing the two species. The leaves of the peach are more broadly lanceolate than those of the almond, coarsely serrate or crenate while the margins of almond-leaves are finely serrate. The glands on the leaf-stalk or leaf of the peach are globose, reniform or mixed; on the almond, the glands are globose. The flowers in the two species are similar but the time of flowering is markedly different. The color of the petals in both varies from pale pink to deep pink with occasional pure white forms; the flowers of true almonds are always large while those of the peach are about equally divided between large and small. The almond, in New York, is out of bloom before flowers of the peach appear, the difference in blooming-time being from one to three weeks.
TREE- AND FRUIT-CHARACTERS OF THE PEACH
Fruit-growers must largely depend on printed descriptions for knowledge of varieties. A well-made description of tree or fruit, to one mentally equipped to interpret it, is second only to having the real objects at hand. But the difficulty is that few excepting professional pomologists know the characters of even the common fruits and their relative importance. Before taking up either botanical or horticultural descriptions of peaches, then, it is necessary to direct attention to the characters of the peach, differences in which distinguish species and varieties. Be it remembered in this study of the characters of the peach, however, that, as fields and woods offer better facilities for the botanist than the herbarium, so the peach-orchard is a fitter place to study the characters of the peach than a printed page.
The single species of the peach in which we are greatly interested has a very characteristic tree, the variations in which are, however, less well marked than those of the tree of any other of our common fruits. The peach-tree is distinguished by its low, roundish and never pyramidal head. Of its gross characters, size is most important in distinguishing varieties, the several more or less distinct types in the species usually being separable by size alone. In considering size, proper allowance must, of course, always be made for environment. There are no true dwarfs among the varieties of Prunus persica cultivated in America.
Habit of growth is nearly as important as size of tree in determining varieties. Thus, a variety may be round-topped, upright-spreading or drooping in habit; the head may be open or dense; the branches long or short, stout or slender; the trunks may be short or long, straight or crooked, much branched or little branched. These habits of growth serve not only to distinguish sorts but often determine whether the tree is sufficiently manageable to make a good orchard-plant.
Hardiness is an important character both in classifying and in determining the orchard-value of a variety. All peaches are tender to cold as compared with other tree-fruits of temperate climates but there is sufficient difference in varieties to permit the designations hardy, half-hardy and tender. In the classificatory scheme in most common use in America, that of Onderdonk and Price, variation in hardiness is the chief determinant of groups.
All peaches come in bearing so early and bear so regularly that varietal differences in these characters scarcely count in classifying, but productiveness varies very characteristically in different varieties. Environment and care greatly influence fruitfulness yet, notwithstanding, the quantity of fruit borne is often a means of identifying a variety and, of course, must always be considered by the cultivator and the breeder.
Resistance to disease and insects is a taxonomic and an economic character of much importance. Thus there are great variations among varieties in resistance to peach-yellows, brown-rot and leaf-curl, the three commonest diseases of this fruit in New York, as there is also in resistance to San Jose scale, the worst insect-pest of the peach in this region and to the peach-borer, the commonest. These examples are multiplied in the discussions of varieties, pains having been taken in the peach-orchards at this Station to determine the relative resistance of all varieties to the pests of this region.
But little attention need be paid to the old bark on peach-trees, since in all varieties it is much the same and is unimportant to the cultivator. The bark of all varieties varies in color on different soils and is always of a lighter hue in cold than in warm regions, in dry than in wet situations.
The branches and branchlets of varieties are very characteristic. The length, thickness, direction, rigidity and the branching angle are all stable characters of varieties, changing but little with differences in soil and climate. The length of the internode is important as is also color, smoothness, amount of pubescence, size and appearance of the lenticels, and the presence of excrescences,--though all are exceedingly variable.
Both leaf-buds and fruit-buds are used in separating groups of peaches but are too nearly alike in the several groups to be of aid in distinguishing the varieties of any group. Fruit-buds are borne in pairs on the wood of the previous year with a leaf-bud separating the members of the pair. The only characters of buds worth noting are size, shape, color and the angle at which the buds stand out from the branches.
After the fruits, the leaves offer the best means of determining groups and varieties of peaches. Leaves are variable, it is true, but usually within limits quite easily set, since the conditions causing the variations are easily discovered. The most usual ones are extremes in soil, moisture, light, heat and the age of the wood upon which the leaves are borne. Much care has been taken to illustrate as accurately as possible the leaves of the varieties given color-plates in this text, size and form being reproduced exactly and color as nearly as color-plate printing permits.
Leaf-size and leaf-form are the first characters of the foliage to study in determining varieties. The former varies somewhat in accordance with the conditions named in the foregoing paragraph but the shape of the leaf changes but little. Fortunately for the student of varieties, leaves differ most in relative length and breadth so that the shape may be accurately indicated by figures which are used in most of the descriptions in The Peaches of New York. Comparisons of the bases and the apices of leaves of different varieties often show distinguishing marks.
The color of leaves in varieties is very constant for both surfaces. The color of the foliage gives an aspect to peaches whereby a variety may often be distinguished in its summer dress at considerable distance. Unfortunately, the colors of leaves in the color-plates in this book cannot be relied upon to give much help in studying this character. Autumnal tints are uniformly the same in peaches and not to be relied upon in classifying varieties.
Several other characters of the leaves must be studied by the systematic pomologist. The leaves of some varieties are thinner than those of others, hence thickness becomes a distinguishing character. Venation of leaves--size and arrangement of veins--is important. Pubescence of leaves cuts quite a figure in the descriptions of many fruits but in the peach is of minor importance because the leaves are not very hairy and the quantity and character of the pubescence is exceedingly variable. Some varieties have relatively few leaves--others many. The leaves of some varieties fall early--others relatively late.
The margins of peach-leaves offer valuable evidence in determining varieties. They may be serrate or crenate, doubly or singly divided, glandular or glandless. Both serrations and glands are best studied in the middle of the sides of leaves, those at the base or apex often being crowded or wanting.
Petioles differ in length, thickness, rigidity, pubescence and color, so that this organ is often a substantial help in identifying varieties. Some say the color of the petiole is correlated with that of the fruit, as it certainly is in such extreme sorts as Snowball and Indian Cling, but it is doubtful whether this correlation goes further than groups and even here does not always hold. Stipules offer no distinguishing marks of importance.
Much use is made in classifying peaches of the presence or absence, the size, color, shape, position and number of glands on the base of the leaf or on the leaf-stalk. These glands may be either stalked or sessile. The terms used in describing glands are easily understood and need no definition unless it be a few words in regard to the shape. Globose glands are small globes, reniform glands are kidney-shaped. In determining the form of glands examinations must be made several times in the season, the end of the summer offering the best opportunity and even then care must be taken to secure old leaves. Glands are less variable in adult trees than in trees not yet in bearing. Pomologists for a hundred years have noted the fact that peaches with glandless leaves are very susceptible to mildew. We find this to be the case on the grounds of this Station. This correlation between glandlessness and mildew may account for the fact that peaches with glandless leaves are rapidly disappearing from American peach-lists. Wickson says it has been found that peaches with glandless leaves resist leaf-curl.[163]
Gregory has made a careful study of the glands on peach-leaves.[164] We publish here the most important facts he brings out.
"In a large number of cases the glands are stable and can be safely used to aid in the identification of certain varieties. There are also varieties in which the glands are exceptionally unstable, being on the border line between the two types--reniform and globose--and having what might be termed mixed glands. These mixed glands are of two kinds: one in which the majority of the glands are reniform, with some globose intermingled; the other in which the globose form predominates. It would be quite possible, as Carriere (1867) suggests, to distinguish a third type of glands--the mixed type.
It is important that leaves should be chosen from healthy branches on bearing trees. It is also best to obtain a large number of leaves or to examine the tree carefully before making the final selection of leaves. Mature leaves are best because their glands are full-sized and correctly shaped, while on young leaves the form of the glands is usually obscure. This is particularly true of the reniform glands. On the other hand, old, partly decayed, globose glands frequently have much the appearance of reniform glands.
The structure of the glands shows that they are true glands, having an upper layer of long, rectangular, secretory cells that produce a sweet substance, the function of which is not apparent. After the glands have ceased secreting they begin to decay, becoming brown on the upper surface and slowly disappearing until almost nothing is left. This decaying is a very complicated process, being preceded in every case by a suberization and thickening of the cell walls.
The spines of the leaf are very similar to the glands in structure, having the same upper layer of long cells, but with much more heavily cutinized walls. A study of the transitional forms indicates that the glands are merely modified leaf spines.
The leaves with reniform glands are apparently the highest type and the glandless leaves the lowest, with the transition through the globose type. In support of this view is the fact that whenever typically glandless leaves become possessed of glands they are always of the globose type.
The serrations of the glandless leaves are very strikingly different from those on a leaf with glands. The former leaves are deeply and doubly serrate, while the margins of the latter are always single and crenate. Almost invariably, when glands develop on a normally glandless leaf, the serrations are transformed to crenations, indicating that there is a very close correlation between the glands and the crenations on the edges of the leaves."
The French pomologists, Poiteau and Turpin,[165] seem to have first made note of the glands in describing peaches, recording their discovery by M. Desprez in the nurseries at the Luxembourg in 1810, after which, for a half-century, French, English and German pomologists regarded them as an infallible means of distinguishing varieties. But, by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, classifiers began to give them up because of their variability on leaves of trees of the same variety or even on the same tree. Even Darwin made note of their insufficiency in taxonomic work.[166] Now, no one familiar with any considerable number of varieties of peaches would attach very great importance to glands in a system of classification.
The flowers of peaches are very characteristic, helping to delineate the groups in the several classificatory schemes of various pomologists and being ample to identify not a few varieties. Peach-flowers differ in time of appearance; in length of blooming-season; they may be large, medium or small; pink, rose and rarely white; borne on pedicels of varying length, thickness, color and pubescence; and both the floral and reproductive organs have modifications of their several structures. The size, color and shape of peach-flowers are well shown in the first six color-plates. In some species of Prunus, as some of the plums, the reproductive organs differ greatly in ability to perform their functions, but the blossoms of edible peaches are seemingly always self-fertile and there are less often the mal-formations found in the reproductive organs of some plums.
A well-marked correlation[167] between the color in the inside of the calyx-cup and the color of the flesh of the fruit is one of the distinguishing features of peaches. Yellow-fleshed peaches develop from blossoms in which the inside color of the calyx-cup is orange; white-fleshed peaches develop from those in which the color is greenish or greenish-yellow sometimes approaching a very light orange easily distinguished from the dark orange of the other group. Since the discovery of this correlation in the Station orchards by Mr. Charles Tubergen it has been in yearly use and has enabled us to tell a year or two in advance the flesh-color of seedling peaches, since the first peach-blossoms seldom set fruit.
The fruits, however, furnish by far the best characters upon which to found a classification of peaches. The simplest classification of peaches begins by separating them into smooth-skinned and pubescent sorts; each of these divisions is redivided into clingstones and freestones; these four groups may then be separated into yellow-fleshed, white-fleshed and red-fleshed peaches; still further, most, not all, of the twelve groups made in the first three divisions, separate into round, flat or beaked peaches. These are the major characters of the fruits, little influenced by cultivation or environment, after which there are many minor characters such as size, shape, color, quality and season, all very responsive to changed conditions, that help to describe definitely the many varieties of Prunus persica. The most variable of the minor characters is shape, all peaches tending to lose rotundity in southern climates and to become oblong and beaked. The length and quantity of the pubescence on peaches vary considerably in different soils--the warmer and lighter the soil, the less pubescence. The skin adheres closely to the flesh in some varieties; in others it is non-adherent.
The characters found in the stones of the many species of Prunus are of great value in determining species but they help but little in determining the horticultural varieties of any one species. The stones of the peach do vary, however, very materially in size, shape, grooves and ridges, pitting and in characteristics at base and apex. The color-plates in this text illustrate these differences very well. One may generalize and say that the stones of the freestones are more deeply furrowed and that the sides are smoother than in the clingstones.
The characters of the peach are set forth on the opposite page by reproducing a description as made at this Station in describing a variety for The Peaches of New York. Such a description is, however, but a skeleton, as dead as dry bones, unless a living picture of the variety be made by filling out and covering the skeleton with ample remarks made as the describer studies the plant in the field.
A more detailed discussion of the horticultural and botanical characters of the peach logically follows here.
PRUNUS PERSICA Stokes.
1. P. Persica Stokes Bot. Mat. Med. =3=:100. 1812. 2. P. Persica var. vulgaris Maximowicz Mel. Biol. =11=:668. 1883. 3. P. Persica var. necturina Maximowicz l. c. 669. (nectarine) 4. P. Persica var. laevis Gray 5. P. Persica var. nucipersica Dippel Handb. Laub. =3=:606. 1893. (nectarine) 6. P. Persica var. platycarpa Bailey Cyc. Am. Hort. 1456. 1901. (Flat Peach, Peento) 7. Amygdalus Persica Linnaeus Sp. Pl. Ed. =1=:472. 1753. 8. A. Persica var. nucipersica Linnaeus l. c. 676. (nectarine) 9. A. nectarina Aiton Hort. Kew Ed. =2=, =3=:194. 1811. (nectarine) 10. A. Nuci-persica Reichenbach Fl. Germ. Exc. 647. 1832. (nectarine) 11. A. laevis Dietrich Syn. Pl. =3=:42. 1852. (nectarine) 12. Persica vulgaris Miller Gard. Dict. Ed. =8=: No. 1. 1768. 13. P. nucipersica Borkhausen Forstb. Beschrb. 205. 1790. (nectarine) 14. P. laevis De Candolle Fl. Fran. =4=:487. 1805. (nectarine) 15. P. platycarpa Decaisne Jard. Fr. Mus. (Pechers) 42. 1872-75. (Flat Peach, Peento)
Tree low, attaining a height of thirty feet, diffuse, open-headed, broad-topped, often without a central leader; trunk at maturity sometimes a foot in diameter; bark dark reddish-brown, in old trees rough and scaly; branches spreading, slender and sometimes drooping; twigs round, rather slender, glabrous, glossy green changing to shades of red, with numerous, large or small, conspicuous, usually raised lenticels.
The leaves are alternate, simple, four to seven inches long, one to two inches wide, broad-lanceolate or more often oblong-lanceolate; upper surface dark green, smooth, dull or shining, some rugose along the midrib; lower surface paler, with little or no pubescence; apex long-tapering, base abrupt or acute; margins coarsely or finely serrate, or crenate, sometimes doubly toothed, teeth tipped with glands or sometimes glandless; petioles stout, from a quarter-inch to an inch long, grooved, glandless or more often with from one to eight globose or reniform glands, sometimes mixed, a part of which may be on the base of the leaf.
The flowers develop from scaly buds on the wood of the previous season; flower-buds plump, conical or obtuse, free or appressed and usually appearing before the leaves; flowers of two distinct sizes, with some intermediates, the smaller size ranging under an inch in diameter, the larger, an inch and a half or more; the floral color ranges from an occasional pure white through shades of pink to deep red; fragrant and always pleasantly so; pedicels very short, sometimes seemingly wanting, glabrous, green; calyx-tube urn-shaped, usually smooth but sometimes pubescent without, green overlaid with red outside, greenish-yellow or dark orange within; calyx-lobes five in number, short, broad, glabrous within, pubescent without; petals ovate, five in number, rounded at the apex which is sometimes notched, tapering to a claw, sometimes notched at the base; stamens twenty to thirty, about one-half inch long, slender, distinct, usually colored; anthers yellow; ovary sessile, pubescent, one-celled, surmounted by a simple style which is terminated with a small stigma, the whole pistil equaling the stamens in length or longer.
Fruit a fleshy drupe, sub-globular but much modified in shape and size under cultivation; suture usually distinct; cavity well marked, abrupt; apex with a mamelon or mucronate tip; color varying from greenish-white to orange-yellow, usually with a red cheek on the side exposed to the sun, sometimes covered with red; very pubescent except in the nectarine; skin adherent or free from the pulp; flesh greenish-white or yellowish, often stained with red at the pit, occasionally red, sweetish, acidulous, aromatic; stone free or clinging, elliptic or ovoid, sometimes flat, compressed, pointed; outer surfaces wrinkled and pitted, inner surfaces polished; ventral and dorsal sutures grooved or furrowed, sometimes winged; the seed almond-like, aromatic, bitter.
The characters given in the foregoing description are those of the cultivated peach--the consummate fruit of Prunus persica. The generic name, Prunus, is the ancient Latin name of the plum, Prunus domestica, the type species. The specific name, persica, commemorates the old belief that the peach came from Persia. The common name, peach, in English, as in most European languages, is a derivative from persica. Amygdalus, found several times in the synonomy, is the Syrian name of the almond. The drupe-fruits are put in two, three and sometimes four genera by various botanists but in the fruit-books issued by this Station, following most botanists and pomologists, all are put in a single genus, Prunus. Such lumping of several distinct fruits into one genus has its disadvantages but the several fruits cannot be reasonably separated because outliers closely connect all. Hybridization between the cultivated stone-fruits adds to the perplexities of classification.
Prunus persica is variously divided by botanists and pomologists. Quite commonly two botanical varieties of edible peaches are split off, as shown in the synonomy, to separate the nectarine and the flat peaches from the pubescent and globular peaches. But these sub-species, originating over and over in the case of the nectarine as a bud or seed-mutation and the flat peaches probably having originated as a mutation, are not more distinct from the parent species than the red-fleshed sorts, the snowball peaches, the Yellow Transvaals from South Africa, the nippled peach, the cleft peach, the beaked peach, the winter peaches of China, or the pot-grown dwarfs from China; in fact, are not more different from other peaches than a clingstone is from a freestone, a yellow flesh from a white flesh or a large-flowered from a small-flowered sort. All constitute merely pomological groups, which, more and more, are becoming interminably confused by hybridization.
We name but one sub-species of Prunus persica, and that doubtful. Mr. Frank N. Meyer of the United States Department of Agriculture has recently introduced into the United States cuttings of a wild peach from the province of Kansu, China, which he thinks has horticultural value. The peach is Prunus persica potanini Batalin (Act. Hort. Petrop. =12=:164. 1892) which Mr. Meyer describes as follows:[168]
"A wild peach of the davidiana type, but differing from it in various points. Collected at the base of sheltered mountains at an elevation of 4300 feet. A tall shrub or even small tree, up to 30 feet in height, bark of stem or trunk dark reddish-brown and quite smooth in the younger shoots; leaves like those of Amygdalus davidiana but often broader in the middle and always less pointed. Fruits of round-elongated form; skin covered with a heavy down, no edible flesh; stones of elliptical shape, grooves longer than in A. davidiana, shells very hard and thick, kernels elongated and relatively small. Found growing at elevations from 4000 to 7000 feet, in side valleys away from the Siku river; thrives especially well in sheltered and warm mountain pockets. Of value especially as a stock for stone-fruits and possibly able to stand even more dry heat than A. davidiana; also recommended as an ornamental spring-flowering tree, especially for the drier parts of the United States. Chinese name Mao t'ao, meaning 'hairy peach.'"
There are many ornamental forms of the peach-tree--sorts with single or double flowers, white, pink or red in color, normal, red or variegated foliage and standard or dwarf trees. The best-known named ornamental peaches are camelliaeflora with large, carmine flowers and its sub-variety, plena, with double flowers; versicolor with different colored flowers on branches of the same tree; atropurpurea with brownish-red foliage; foliis rubris, similar or possibly the same as the preceding, the color in both extending to the fruit; magnifica, a semi-double with brilliant carmine-crimson flowers; pyramidalis, a pyrimidal form; pendula, a weeping peach; and still others, of the distinctness of which we cannot be certain, as dianthi-alba-plena, rubro-plena, and coccineo-plena. With these ornamentals we are not to be further concerned.
Of Japanese garden-forms the following varieties have been described: P. Persica var. densa Makimo Tokyo Bot. Mag. =16=:178. 1902. P. persica var. vulgaris, f. stellata Makimo l. c. =22=:119. 1908. P. Persica var. vulgaris, f. praematura Makimo l. c. =22=:119. 1908.
Species are but convenient groups, their limits reflecting the judgment of the species-maker. Were the authors of this text to divide Prunus persica, the cleavage lines would be other than those indicated in the foregoing paragraphs. Prunus persica might be divided, though there is no intention of furthering confusion by the addition of new names, into two species. One would include the white-fleshed, clingstone peaches, with large flowers and calyx greenish-yellow inside; the other the yellow-fleshed, freestone peaches, with small flowers and calyx-cups orange inside. Primitive forms in China indicate such a division, the evolution of varieties suggests it and the present disposition of the characters named as separating these theoretical species attest the reasonableness of such a separation. The primitive forms have been described and the descent of varieties may be traced in the last two chapters, so that we need only amplify the statement as to the present disposition of characters.
The characters in the two hypothetical species have been thoroughly shuffled by hybridization but even if there is not correlation, as there certainly is between color in calyx-cup and color of flesh, it might be expected that those associated in the primitive plant, the Adam of the race, would, despite the shuffling, still be most often associated. What are the facts? In the Station orchard are 109 white-fleshed peaches; 40 per ct. of these are semi-cling or clingstones leaving 60 per ct. nearly or quite free (there is constant selection for freestones); 64 per ct. have large flowers; all have calyx-cups yellowish-green inside. There are in this orchard 106 yellow-fleshed peaches; but 17 per ct. of these are cling or semi-cling, the remainder being either quite free or nearly so; 73 per ct. have small or medium-sized flowers; all have calyx-cups deeply colored with orange inside.
Similarities in characters indicate so close a relationship between the almond and the peach that one might well suspect many hybrids between the two. Yet there appear to be but few clear cases of peach and almond crosses. Knight[169] reports crossing the two, the doubtful results of which led him to believe, as we have seen, that the peach is but a modified almond. Several such crosses are indicated in botanical literature[170] but whether all refer to one or several supposed crosses there is no way of knowing--probably to one. The almond blooms so much earlier than the peach that crosses could hardly occur in nature. A hybrid between the two from which could be evolved a late-blooming almond is a consummation to be wished.
THE NECTARINE
The nectarine is a hairless peach. The tree differs in no respect from that of the peach and besides the absence of pubescence the only other distinguishing marks between the fruits are smaller size, firmer flesh, greater aroma and a distinct and richer flavor in nectarines. Even the varieties of the two fruits correspond in characters. Thus, there are clingstone and freestone sorts of each; both may have red, yellow, or white flesh; the flowers of both may be large or small; nectarine leaves, in one variety or another, show all the variations in glands and serrations known to the peach; and the stones and kernels are indistinguishable. There seem to be no records so far, however, of flat or beaked nectarines, abnormalities each represented in several varieties of peaches. The two fruits are adapted to the same soil and climatic conditions and wherever the peach is grown, the world over, the nectarine is found.
The established history of the nectarine goes back 2000 years and then merges into that of the peach. Despite the fact that De Candolle[171] "sought in vain for a proof that the nectarine existed in Italy in the time of ancient Rome," we are convinced that Pliny's "duracinus" is the nectarine. Matthiolus[172] in 1554 discusses Pliny's statements concerning the kinds of peaches at length and concludes that the author's "duracinus" is the peach. Dalechamp, in 1587, and J. Bauhin, in 1650, both describe nectarines after which botanists and pomologists invariably include this fruit. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries the nectarine was called "nucipersica" because it resembled in smoothness and color of the outer skin as well as in size and shape, the walnut. "Nectarine," the meaning of the word obvious, appears first to have been used for this fruit, in the English language at least, by Parkinson in 1629 who describes six varieties[173] and gives us the information "they have been with us not many years." Gerarde, the great English herbalist, 1597, does not mention them. We find the nectarine first mentioned in America in 1722 by Robert Beverly in his History of Virginia, who, after discussing the culture of peaches, nectarines and apricots, says (pages 259, 260): "Peaches and nectarines I believe to be spontaneous, somewhere or other on that continent, for the Indians have, and ever had greater variety, and finer sorts of them than the English."
The nectarine is one of the most interesting phenomena in horticulture. It is the classical example of bud- and seed-variation, furnishing more instances of mutation, and these more instructive, than have yet come from any other fruit. Darwin, with the magnificent exhaustiveness which characterized his method, brought together in Animals and Plants under Domestication[174] a striking array of facts which leaves nothing to be added as to the manner in which the peach and nectarine are reciprocally reproduced the one from the other. He shows by numerous examples: (1) That nectarines may spring from peach-stones and peaches from nectarine-stones. (2) That peach-trees produce nectarines by bud-variation and nectarine-trees likewise produce peaches, and that either the nectarines or peaches so arising will come true to seed. (3) That either peach or nectarine-trees may produce individual fruits half-nectarine and half-peach. (4) A case is cited of a nectarine tree bearing a half-and-half fruit and subsequently a true peach.
It must be noted that in all of the variations so far recorded there are no intermediate forms between the two fruits. The peach produced in these bud-variations is a peach and nothing but a peach; the nectarine, a nectarine and nothing but a nectarine. Even in those remarkable phenomena, of which several are recorded, in which the fruits are divided into halves or quarters, one or more segments being peach and one or more nectarine, there can be no mistake as to peach and nectarine in pubescence, color or flavor. The nectarine from the peach, thus becomes as clear-cut a case of discontinuous variation as can be. If we accept the mutation theory of the origin of species--new species arising suddenly at a single step--the nectarine is a species in process of birth.
As yet we are entirely ignorant in regard to the conditions under which the peach or the nectarine sports, the one producing the other. It is wholly a natural phenomenon, for no one has been able to cause the peach to produce the hairless form or the nectarine to bring forth a downy fruit. The relations of the two fruits have furnished a fertile field of inquiry for over a century but the problem is one of those mysterious ones in which there are many facts that cannot be fitted into a theory, so that our ignorance is as profound now as ever. There are, however, several theories which, without going into full detail, need to be stated.
The oldest notion is that the production of a nectarine on a peach-tree is due to the direct action of pollen from some nearby nectarine-tree on the ovary of the peach. This theory, wholly at variance with present knowledge, is also discredited by the many instances in which the sports occur when the two fruits are not growing in the same neighborhood or even region. Thus, within ten years, several cases of nectarines on peach-trees have occurred in this State where the nectarine is scarcely known. Besides, crossing these fruits shows no direct effect of pollen--as is true with nearly all other plants. Still further, when a branch of a peach has borne a nectarine it usually goes on year after year producing nectarines; and certainly impregnation of a flower by foreign pollen could not so profoundly modify a branch. There is so little foundation for this belief that it would not be mentioned were it not that many fruit-growers still look to the action of pollen as the explanation of the phenomenon.
Another, and a much more probable explanation, is that every sporting peach or nectarine-tree is a more or less remote hybrid. There is a growing belief that species are fixed and that crossing is the only source of new seed- or bud-forms. Certainly all who have crossed plants in any considerable numbers know that hybridity is at least one cause, and a frequent one, of mutations. It is possible that sometime in the past the peach and the nectarine were crossed, the offspring showing no trace of the cross, and that now there is an occasional disassociation of the characters brought together by such crossing. There are several objections to this hypothesis. One is that two forms sufficiently distinct to induce so striking a variation as a nectarine from a peach, must have differed in tree as well as in fruit-characters and that these differences would crop out just as smoothness of fruit so frequently does. Another, and less potent objection, is that the nectarine has never been found wild, that it never becomes naturalized, that it is shorter-lived and less vigorous and behaves in general like an artificial plant.
The third, and at present the most acceptable theory, is that we have in the nectarine from the peach what De Vries calls a retrogressive mutation. That is, an active character, in this case pubescence on the fruit, becomes latent and appears to be lost--a type of mutation frequent among cultivated plants. The nectarine, then, is a peach with one character subtracted. When the nectarine yields a peach, the character is restored. The one is a negative, the other a positive step; one is retrogressive, the other progressive mutation. The speculations as to what causes these mutations are as yet too vague to be profitable. Probably we can never make use of the cause by which mutations arise or of the conditions leading to them until we can induce these strange variations. That they are due to disturbances in the processes of cell-division is the theory now current--sufficiently comprehensive and sufficiently vague to be a most convenient explanation, at any rate.
Nectarines do not attain the perfection in New York reached west of the Rocky Mountains. The trees, possibly, are a little less manageable in the orchard, less vigorous and certainly more susceptible to pests. Nectarines, in particular, suffer more than peaches from the scourge of the crescent sign, curculio, a pest which finds all smooth-skinned stone-fruits much to its taste and the nectarine more than others. Then, too, whether fresh, canned or dried, fruit-buyers in America prefer the peach. This discrimination in favor of the peach is largely due to lack of knowledge of the nectarine, which, though different from the commoner fruit, is equally delectable, fresh or preserved, and certainly is a handsomer product preserved either by canning or evaporating. Indeed, the dried nectarine, with its beautiful, translucent, amber hue is the most attractive of all cured fruits. The nectarine-industry, however, belongs to California, where all conditions favor production, canning and curing.
PRUNUS DAVIDIANA (Carrière) Franchet
P. Davidiana Franchet Nouv. Arch. Mus. Paris ser. 2, =V=:255 (Pl. David. =1=:103). 1883.
Persica Davidiana Carrière Rev. Hort. 74. 1872.
Prunus Persica var Davidiana Maximowicz Bul. Acad. Sci. St. Petersbourg =29=:81; Mel. Biol. =11=:667. 1883.
Tree attaining a height of twenty-five feet on the Station grounds, vigorous, upright, with slight spreading tendency, dense-topped, hardy in tree but not in flower-bud, unproductive; trunk stocky; branches thick, smooth, bronze-colored; branchlets slender--inclined to rebranch, long, with rather short internodes, ash-gray mingled toward the base with dark brown, glabrous, with inconspicuous, small, slightly raised lenticels.
Leaves five and one-half inches long, one and one-eighth inches wide, curled downward, oval to obovate-lanceolate, thick; upper surface smooth, dull, dark green; lower surface grayish-green; margin coarsely serrate, tipped with reddish-brown glands; petiole five-eighths inch long, glandless or with one or two small, globose, reddish glands at the base of the leaf.
Flower-buds tender, small, pointed, plump, appressed, brownish-red; flowers appear very early, a few days earlier than Prunus tomentosa, usually on short spurs; blossoms one and five-eighths inches across, whitish, tinged with pale pink near the margins, well distributed, usually singly; pedicels short, glabrous, green; calyx-tube reddish-green, orange-colored within, obconic, glabrous; calyx-lobes long, narrow, glabrous within and without; petals widely spaced, oval, shallowly dentate, tapering to long, white claws; filaments shorter than the petals; pistil red, heavily pubescent at the ovary, as long as the stamens.
Fruit less than one inch in diameter, nearly spherical; cavity medium in width and depth; suture shallow, deeper toward the base; apex mucronate; color grayish-white turning yellow at maturity; pubescence downy; skin wrinkles and roughens before maturity and soon decays; flesh very thin, rather dry, tasteless and insipid, lacking almost entirely the flavor of the peach; not edible; stone separates from the pulp readily even before ripe, nearly spherical, plump, very blunt at base and apex; surfaces deeply pitted.
Father David's peach, Prunus davidiana, has been grown in Europe since 1865 as an ornamental, seeds of it having been sent from China to France in that year by Father David, a missionary traveler.[175] The species is described as flowering in America in the Arnold Arboretum as early as 1888,[176] seeds from which the trees grew having been sent from China. Some ten or twelve years ago the species was distributed by the United States Department of Agriculture, trees being received at this Station in the spring of 1906. Meanwhile, agricultural explorers representing this country in China have discovered that the species is much used by the Chinese as a stock upon which to work other species of Prunus. Whereupon, new distributions were made through seeds and plants to nearly every fruit-growing state in the Union. We are, therefore, now able to speak of the behavior of the Davidiana peach in America with some degree of confidence as to its future as a stock for peaches. But, first, a word as to its habitat and uses in China.
The several importations of seeds recorded by the United States Department of Agriculture seem all to have been made from the province of Chili in China and from the cities of Pekin and Tientsin in the neighborhood of which the tree is commonly found wild. According to Bretschneider,[177] the species was first discovered by Bunge near Peking in 1831 who took it to be an almond. The same authority says that Father David's seeds came from wild trees growing in the mountains near Jehol, and that the species is much cultivated in the gardens of Peking, there being two varieties, one with rose-colored and the other with white flowers. At the time of its introduction into Europe, it was considered, by some, the wild form of the cultivated peach. The fruit of David's peach is not edible and peach-growers would have but passing interest in the species as a very attractive ornamental were it not for the fact that it is a common and most valuable stock, used for centuries in China for several of the stone-fruits.
It is, then, with a view to its fitness as a stock that the Davidiana peach must be discussed. Its characters in several respects indicate that it may make an invaluable stock in America as it has long been in China. For this purpose it seems possible to use it equally well for several stone-fruits.
As it grows on the Station grounds the most experienced fruit-grower cannot guess whether Prunus davidiana is a peach, nectarine, almond, apricot or plum. As we shall show later, too, it hybridizes with several other species of its genus. Its similarities to all of these stone-fruits give a clue to its value as a stock--it may be used for all. It is the commonest stock for all of these fruits in parts of China and is sometimes used for the cherry as well. It is reported by the United States Department of Agriculture[178] to have been tried in commercial plantings of peaches, plums, apricots and almonds in California and Texas and for all is "unusually promising."
The trees are vigorous, healthy, hardy, and resistant to drouth. Consorted with any stone-fruit it should impart these qualities in some degree to the resulting tree. On the Station grounds, Prunus davidiana is growing with vigor and health despite the fact that in the ten years of its existence here we have had all but record-breaking extremes of cold, heat, drouth and rain--a decade long to be noted for its extremes of weather. It seems to stand the heat of Texas, and in Minnesota has withstood cold as low as forty degrees below zero, a temperature which kills commercial varieties to the ground. It cannot be fruited, however, in cold climates as its buds swell quickly with rises of temperature and succumb to subsequent cold; neither will it fruit in regions of late frost since it is one of the earliest species in the genus Prunus to flower. In Texas and southern California, according to the United States Department of Agriculture, it is proving resistant to drouth and in the latter region to alkali as well. In very dry and exposed places, it is said to lose its tree-characters and to become a thrifty shrub.
Present nursery practices in growing peaches are unsatisfactory in the extreme. More and more, pits from canneries are being planted for stocks. The pits come from a great diversity of varieties and the resulting seedlings are variable in vigor, health, size and capacity to take the bud. Should no unsurmountable weaknesses appear in Prunus davidiana it is almost certain that its seedlings will be more satisfactory as stocks for the peach than those from either cannery pits or from pits grown on southern wild trees. The trees do not fruit well in this climate, even when buds and flowers escape the cold, possibly because of infertility of bloom, and for this reason, the chief objection so far, some favorable region would have to be discovered in which to grow the pits.
As one might suspect from its similarities to the several stone-fruits, Prunus davidiana gives promise of being a go-between in hybridization. I. V. Mijurin, a noted Russian hybridist of Kozloo, Russia, has crossed the Davidiana peach and the dwarf almond, Prunus nana, with the idea of getting a hardy fruit for central Russia. The resulting offspring, according to Mr. F. N. Meyer,[179] looks in tree like the peach-parent but the fruit is more like that of the almond-parent. The fruit of the hybrid is inedible but the plant is a handsome ornamental. Mr. Mijurin states that while neither of the two parents will hybridize with the common peach, this hybrid does. Prunus davidiana, then, like the Sand Cherry of the Western Plains, may prove to be a valuable go-between in hybridizing species of Prunus.
The fruit has no comestible value. It is small, less than an inch in diameter, nearly round, very downy, yellow at maturity, with thin, dry, tasteless flesh which parts readily from the stone even before fully ripe. As if to complete its worthlessness as an edible product, it begins to shrivel as maturity approaches and soon decays. In fruit, even more than in tree, it is an intermediate between the peach and the almond.
A word must be said as to the merits of Prunus davidiana as an ornamental. It is the first harbinger of spring in the great family to which it belongs, bursting into a profusion of white or pinkish flowers with the approach of warm weather even before forsythias are in flower. Its thickly set, erect branchlets are wands of pinkish-white two feet in length, making a handsome tree and furnishing beautiful cut-flowers. If grown for its flowers, however, one must be content in northern climates to have it in bloom only about one season out of three but even so it repays culture. The Chinese cultivate dwarf specimens, possibly a dwarf form, for winter-flowering and the plant, it would seem, would readily lend itself to winter-forcing in American floriculture. The tree, quite aside from its flowers, is handsome at all times. A form with pure white flowers is a very desirable ornamental.[180] On the Station grounds this white-flowering peach has a fastigiate habit of growth and resembles somewhat a small Lombardy poplar.
PRUNUS MIRA Koehne.
P. mira Koehne Plant. Wilson. Pt. 2, No. =4=:272. 1912.
Tree thirty feet in height; trunk sixteen inches in diameter; branches very smooth, those of the current year's growth green, the older ones dark reddish-yellow; flowering-season short; stipules lacking or obscure; petioles five-sixteenths to ten-sixteenths of an inch long, with from two to four glands toward the apex, the glands broadly elliptical, disc-shaped; leaf at the base usually roundly lanceolate, two to four inches long, nine-sixteenths to one and one-sixteenth inches broad, gradually narrowing toward the apex; margin broadly crenulate-serrulate, tapering upward without division; teeth crowned with small, soot-colored, mucronate glands; upper surface clear green, glabrous; lower surface paler, villous along both sides of the lower ribs and the rest glabrous; veins on both sides twelve to sixteen, the veinlets somewhat raised on the under side.
The pedicels of the single or twinned fruits two-sixteenths to three-sixteenths of an inch long, very thick, glabrous; drupes somewhat dry, sub-globose, one and one-eighth inches long, one inch in diameter, densely tomentose, edible; stone ovate, somewhat compressed, dimensions three-fourths by one-half by three-eighths inches; dorsal suture keeled, the ventral surface covered with narrow ridges, the ridges at the base of the keel nearly disappearing, the rest inconspicuous.
Prunus mira is a new peach discovered in China by Mr. E. H. Wilson of the Arnold Arboretum. The foregoing technical description is a translation from the original description by Koehne. Mr. Wilson describes for The Peaches of New York the outstanding botanical and horticultural characters of Prunus mira as follows:
"Prunus mira is a small bushy tree, growing about 6m. tall, with a trunk about 1m. in girth and a crown some 8m. through. The branches are relatively slender and the branchlets twiggy, and these, together with the narrow, lance-shaped, long-pointed leaves, give the plant a very distinct appearance. The fruit is roundish oval, about 4.5 cm. high and 3.5-4 cm. broad, downy on the outside, with white flesh and a free stone. The flavor is the same as that of fruits from the semi-wild plants of the Common Peach (P. Persica). The stone is 2 to 2.2 cm. high and 1.3-1.4 cm. broad, and in shape is flattened ovoid and pointed. The flowers are unknown to me.
This plant grows wild on rather barren mountain slopes at about 3000m. altitude north of the town of Tachienlu on the China-Thibetan borderland, where it was first detected by me on July 9, 1908, and from whence I introduced it by means of seeds in the autumn of 1910. I saw only a few trees, but have reason to believe that it is fairly common, and also that it is thereabouts cultivated for its fruit. In the Arnold Arboretum this species has proved no more hardy than the Common Peach, though from the altitude at which it grows naturally it ought to be the hardier plant. Our largest specimen is 2.5m. high and crown 3m. through. It starts into growth and leafs out much later than the Common Peach, and is therefore much less liable to be affected by late frosts. This is the one advantage so far evident in our experience with this new Peach under cultivation. Undoubtedly it possesses important horticultural possibilities, and especially should it be valuable to the hybridist on account of its small and smooth stone. Indeed, it requires no imagination to realize the advantage to be gained by supplanting in our present day race of garden peaches for the large and deeply furrowed stone one that is quite smooth and small."
Prunus mira is now under cultivation at the Arnold Arboretum near Boston, in the parks at Rochester, New York, on the grounds of this Station and at Brookville, Florida, in charge of the United States Department of Agriculture. No doubt within a few years we shall have positive evidence of its horticultural value.
PUBESCENT-FRUITED SPECIES OF PRUNUS FROM THE UNITED STATES
Seven pubescent-fruited species of Prunus are found in the Southwestern States. From reading the descriptions, it is hard to tell whether these plants, unique in more than one respect, are most closely related to peaches, plums, apricots or almonds. Professor S. C. Mason of the United States Department of Agriculture, who has studied these fruits,[181] thinks that some if not all of them may have horticultural value, at least in the Southwest where fluctuations of heat and cold are great and drought and alkalinity of soil must be endured by plant-life. They deserve brief mention in The Peaches of New York because of the possibility that some of them can be used as dwarfing-stocks for the peach and possibly that some may be hybridized with cultivated peaches. The species, with brief notes taken for most part from Mason, are as follows:
Prunus texana Dietrich, the "wild peach" of Texas, is a plum-like fruit from eastern Texas of which there are already several hybrids with the wild plums of the region. Prunus andersonii Gray is the "wild almond" or "wild peach" of Nevada. The species is found in western Nevada and eastern California in a region subject to severe cold in winter and extreme drought and heat in summer. One cultivator of this species suggests it as a good stock for the peach and the almond and thinks it has possibilities for hybridization.[182] The "desert apricot," Prunus eriogyna Mason, comes from a very restricted region in southern California. The characters of this species should fit it to endure the environment on the desert slopes of mountains. The "desert almond," Prunus fasciculata Torrey, sometimes called "wild peach" and "wild almond," ranges much farther south and east than Prunus andersonii in southern Nevada and southern California, crossing into southwestern Utah and northwestern Arizona, and grows in gravels and sands where its roots penetrate to great depth. Prunus minutiflora Engelman, the "Texas almond," is found in southwestern Texas, a shrub which, like the former species and the one following, is dioecious, a marked and unique peculiarity of these three species. The "Mexican almond," Prunus microphylla Hemsley, is found in the high mountain region of Mexico. Prunus havardii Wight, is known only in a restricted region in western Texas. The last two species are so little known that one cannot even surmise whether they may have horticultural possibilities.
HORTICULTURAL CLASSIFICATIONS OF THE PEACH
The opening years of the Nineteenth Century mark the first attempts at classifying peaches. By 1818 as many as three classificatory schemes had been proposed, all being modifications of the same general arrangement. July 7, 1818, John Robertson read a paper on classifying peaches and nectarines before the Horticultural Society of London. Later, this was printed in the Transactions of the Society[183] together with a classification by M. Poiteau from the Bon Jardinier and another by Count Lelieur from his Pomone Francaise. In January, 1824, George Lindley read before the same society a classification which was but an extension of the older arrangements.[184]
Robertson separated peaches into true peaches and nectarines and these in turn into Classes, Divisions and Sub-divisions. He founded the two classes on the presence or absence of glands; for each of his classes he made two divisions distinguished by the size and color of the flowers; each of the four divisions is once redivided into a sub-division in which the flesh parts from the stone and another in which the flesh adheres to the stone. The two French writers use the same characters but found their second division on the adherence or non-adherence of the flesh to the stone; their third on the size of the flower but making three partitions as to size; and their fourth on the presence or absence of glands which they divide into globose and reniform. Lindley created three classes dependent on the presence or absence and the character of the glands and the character of the serrations; three divisions of each class in accordance as to whether the flowers are large, medium-sized or small; two sub-divisions of each division to agree with the presence or absence of down; and for each sub-division two sections, one for clingstones and one for melters.
This was the age of the classifier and other classifications, all similar in plan, rapidly followed in England, France, Belgium and Germany. No one at this time seems to have attempted a natural classification of peaches.
Of the nine leading American pomological writers of the Nineteenth Century, Coxe, Prince, Cole, Hooper, Elliott and Barry either do not attempt to classify or make but one or two simple divisions. Kenrick, 1832, follows Lindley in part but makes use of season in his classification. Downing in his first edition, 1845, divides peaches into freestones with pale flesh, freestones with deep yellow flesh and clingstones. This simple arrangement by Downing is notable only because it is the first time color of flesh is made use of as a distinguishing mark, the Europeans probably not having done so because yellow-fleshed varieties are rare in Europe whereas in America they are as common or more so than white-fleshed sorts. Thomas, in 1846, did not classify but in later editions divided peaches into two divisions, founded on adherence of flesh to the stone; two classes for each division in accordance with color of flesh; and three sections founded on leaf-serrations and glands.
These Nineteenth Century classifications are artificial. That is, they single out a few points of resemblance and difference and arrange varieties in accordance with them, convenience and facility of use being the controlling principles. They are natural to a degree, however, because varieties agreeing in one point of structure commonly agree in other characters. With the peach, more than in the artificial classification of most other fruits, the characters are readily distinguished and are stable. Yet most English pomologies now arrange varieties of peaches alphabetically, while the American texts do the same or use the pseudo-natural system of Onderdonk. His classification we are about to discuss. The early artificial arrangements failed to stand the test of time because classifiers could not agree upon any one arrangement and added confusion by the multiplicity of them; and, because the new varieties of the last half-century, coming in great numbers, are so poorly described that the great majority of them could not be classified from the data at hand.
In 1887 Gilbert Onderdonk,[185] a special agent of the United States Department of Agriculture, published a natural classification of peaches.[186] He put varieties of peaches into five groups which he called races and to which he gave the names: Persian, Northern Chinese, Spanish, Southern Chinese and Peento. He bounded peach-culture in America on the north by the Great Lakes and on the south by the Gulf and divided this great region into five zones to each of which he assigned one of his races. Onderdonk studied peaches in Texas and found there remarkable distinguishing characters; as, in adaptations to southern climates, in length of the rest-period, in differences in leafing, blooming and fruiting-time, and in the organs of the plants. Professor R. H. Price, working with a large number of varieties at the Texas Agricultural College, verified and greatly extended Onderdonk's observations.[187] Eventually, Price became the pontifical authority in this country on the classification of peaches and in numerous articles and addresses set forth the Onderdonk grouping of varieties so convincingly that it was adopted by practically all American pomologists and at present is in use, to some degree at least, in nearly all of our horticultural literature. It becomes necessary, therefore, to scrutinize closely this natural classification of Onderdonk and Price.
The end to be attained in a classification of peaches, as in classifying natural objects of any kind, is to provide an epitome of the knowledge of the fruits classified. Incidentally, a classification helps in the identification of varieties of peaches. Does the Onderdonk classification serve these purposes? We have not found that it does. In most arduous attempts to arrange the sorts of peaches growing on the Station grounds according to the Onderdonk plan, we have wholly failed. Even the varieties named as types do not fit, as they grow in the north, in the places provided for them by these southern classifiers. Indeed, we have wasted so much time and patience in attempting to group varieties according to Onderdonk and Price, and with so little success, that the Onderdonk classification seems to us to be cursed with the confusion of Babel. Since pomologists so generally accept this classification, these words demand that it be shown wherein this attempt at a natural arrangement of varieties fails.
In the first place the basis of Onderdonk's classification, as the names suggest, is regional variation. Each race stands for a region, the Peento included--for the name is very obviously Chinese. Incompleteness, then, is the first fault of this system for there are other regions in which races of peaches just as distinct as those named have developed: as, for examples, the Bokhara represents a hardy "Russian race;" Yellow Transvaal belongs to the very peculiar "South African race;" in the rich alluvial lands of Egypt, the "Egyptian race" has developed; still another regional race is found in the evergreen peach of the West Indies. We have no doubt that distinct races of peaches may have originated or will arise in the Canary Islands, Hawaii, New Zealand, Argentina, Chili and Mexico, to mention only countries spoken of in the foregoing pages. The Onderdonk classification can, of course, be extended to take in these new races, most of which are now represented in America, but eventually such a classification would become too cumbersome for use. It must not be overlooked that the Onderdonk classification should be doubled to apply to the nectarine, the other division of Prunus persica, which the present classification wholly ignores.
If the variations are stable, and all regions represented, the likenesses and differences brought about by regional environment may well be used by classifiers. But in the Onderdonk classification unstable variations due to climate are too largely used; as, differences in the succession of life-events, in the rest-period, in the capacity to endure heat and drought, and in minor modifications of organs, as color of foliage and shape of fruit. All of these are variations that fluctuate with even slight changes in the climate. We have said that this classification, though constantly referred to by northern fruit-growers, is not satisfactory in New York. Professor Price, too, found as he went northward that his classificatory scheme was less dependable. He says:[188] "Some of the distinctions made in this classification cannot be noticed with decisive clearness a few hundred miles farther north." A further objection to this regional classification of Onderdonk is that, in the numerous distinct peach-regions of America, new regional variations are arising which make it impossible to classify in accordance with characters that appeared before the peach came to America.
These "races" of Onderdonk and Price, then, by leaving out the peach-floras of many regions, are too exclusive, but it is no less true that they are too inclusive. Thus, the many varieties of the historic peach of western countries are put by the Onderdonk classification in the Persian race. So considered, this Persian race contains types quite as widely separated from each other as are the five "races" of the Onderdonk classification. In one great group are collected early, late, white-fleshed, yellow-fleshed, red-fleshed, globular, oblong, beaked, hardy and tender, vigorous and dwarfish peaches. Persian peaches run the whole gamut of peach-characters, the flatness of the Peento possibly excepted, and from the several hundred sorts a score of "races" might be made. These peaches are noted by Price and Onderdonk as requiring a long period of rest and as succeeding only in northern climates. Yet to this group belong the peaches of France, Spain and Italy; those of the warm parts of Africa, South America and Oceanica; and most of the varieties that thrive at the most northern limits of peach-growing in Europe and America.
The Onderdonk classification, in assigning zones to each of its five races, misleads peach-growers as to the hardiness of varieties. It makes the Peento and honey-flavored peaches much more tender in tree than they are. Varieties of both groups grow as far north as this Station and Waugh reports that one of the Peento varieties "was discovered growing thriftily and fruiting nicely on the grounds of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, Amherst, Massachusetts."[189] Of the score of descendants of the Honey, several are fruiting well on our grounds, four being illustrated and described in The Peaches of New York. If there were a demand for honey-flavored peaches, climate would not prevent their culture in New York.
The name used for the Peento group, if it be worth while keeping these peaches in a group, is inapt. It gives the impression that all, like Peento, are flat peaches--in fact Price several times so publishes them--whereas of the twenty-three sorts described by Hume,[190] though nearly all are seedlings of Peento, only Peento is flat. We must look upon the Peento as a peach-monster similar to the cleft peach, Emperor of Russia, the nippled peach, Teton de Venus, the Perseque with its teat-like protuberances, or the more familiar snow-white and blood-red varieties.
We are not able to see where the Peento group leaves off and the Honey group begins in the Onderdonk classification, though, since varieties of the Peentos have not fruited at Geneva and the several Honey-flavored peaches, though both thrifty in tree and fruitful, are possibly not typical, we ought not to be too critical. As we read the descriptions made by others, however, we are struck by the fact that there are more similarities than differences in the two groups and that the differences are rapidly disappearing through hybridization.
But the obstacle which most effectually blocks the use of Onderdonk's classification in the systematic arrangement of peaches is the brood of hybrid seedling peaches annually brought forth by fruit-growers. No doubt the classification is workable, to a degree, with the type-varieties and a few carefully selected progeny but after the practical peach-grower, with a devil-may-care attitude toward classification, crosses and recrosses the types, the several races become hopelessly interlocked. The characters chiefly used by Onderdonk, as has been said, are fluctuating variations and these do not descend according to Mendelian laws. And so the great out-pouring of varieties during the past quarter-century has literally swamped a classification which served only fairly well when it included but the pioneer varieties. In the trituration of the thousand and more varieties of peaches now going on, the Onderdonk classification will be less and less useful.
In dismissing the Onderdonk scheme as having but limited application for classificatory purposes, acknowledgment is made that it serves other purposes very well. It calls attention to the history of the peach; it shows that racial strains of the peach are arising; it brings out valuable information in regard to hardiness and the rest-period of peaches; it offers instances of modification of the peach by climate; and it shows the capacity of the peach to vary. For thus illuminating the natural history of the peach, more especially the climatology of the peach, pomology is much indebted to Onderdonk and Price.
A key to varieties of peaches.--A natural classification of peaches to show the relationships of varieties is seemingly impossible. The deluge of new varieties, which growers continue with cheerful optimism to pour out, overwhelms the classifier with difficulties. About the best that can be done is to arrange varieties, for convenience in identifying, according to some of the artificial systems of a century ago when the cult of the classifier was at its height. These were really synoptical keys rather than biological classifications. If such a key is to be used very generally by fruit-growers, only characters of the fruit are admissible, thereby attaining necessary simplicity and providing that all data can be had at one examination.
The first division of a synoptical key would of course be founded on the absence or presence of pubescence on the skin; these two great divisions would then be separated into freestones and clingstones; these, in turn, divided in accordance to color of flesh--white, yellow, red; the Peento and honey-flavored peaches make necessary a division in regard to shape--globular, flat, beaked; a further separation into early, medium and late sorts could then be made. A great merit in this extremely simple classification is that the language of the layman fits it. As examples: Greensboro would follow the key from bottom to top--an early, round, white-fleshed, freestone peach; or Salwey, a late, round, yellow-fleshed, freestone peach. This key provides for seventy-two groups, fifty-four for the peach and eighteen for the nectarine, the latter having but the globular form. Other characters, of less general application in the key than those so far used, as size, flavor, adherence or non-adherence of the skin, suture, apex, and stone, could be used to carry this classification still further.
III. COMMERCIAL PEACH-GROWING IN AMERICA
Commercial peach-growing began in America early in the Nineteenth Century. About this time, it will be remembered, budded trees began to take the place of seedlings. Named varieties appeared as a consequence of budding and, as nurseries sprang up in the settled parts of the country, varieties multiplied at a rapid rate. After the year 1800 we read less about peaches as food for hogs and less about peach-products for assuaging the thirst for strong drink. As cities and towns built up, market demands increased and money-making began to quicken the charms of peach-growing. With the coming of extensive plantings and intensive culture in commercial orchards, new and menacing pests and other problems began to appear at every turn. Before the middle of the century, commercial peach-growing was in full swing in the Chesapeake peach-belt and in its infancy in several westward regions. Stories of great success now filled the papers, "peach kings" abounded, and, with the return of good times following the Civil War, fruit-growers indulged in a saturnalia of peach-tree planting. The rouge of speculation made the industry doubly attractive. An account of the rise of commercial peach-growing in America cannot help but be of interest and, besides, it is only by the study of the past of the industry that we can draw safe conclusions for the future.
Peach-growing on a commercial scale in the United States began in what is known as the Peninsula, consisting, technically, of the Eastern Shore of Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey but horticulturally, because of similitude of soil, climate and products, taking in a bit of Virginia, touching eastern Pennsylvania and running up to Long Island. All of this region, including the southern reaches of the Hudson, may be considered as one commercial territory. The peach began its undisputed supremacy among fruits in the orchards of the Peninsula as early as orchards were planted but, beginning with 1800, the industry pushed ahead with leaps and bounds so that the figures at times remind one of Alice in Wonderland when she drank from the magic bottle and immediately grew to gigantic proportions.
In 1800 an orchard of 20,000 trees was set in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, the product to be used in brandy-making.[191] The last peach-grower to engage in the liquor business seems to have been a certain Mr. Bayley in Accomack County, Virginia, the tip of the Peninsula, who in 1814 planted 63,000 trees which six years later yielded fifteen gallons of brandy per 100 trees, worth $2 per gallon--not profitable unless the seed were sown in rows, as was probably the case, and the seedlings permitted to crowd rather closely.[192] One of the first large orchards planted in this region to supply city peach-markets was that of a Mr. Cassidy who set an orchard of 50,000 trees in Cecil County, Maryland, about 1830.[193] The product of this orchard went to market in sailboats and large wagons. The industry was not in full swing in this region until the fifties when orchards were planted all along the water courses in Cecil, Kent and Queen Anne counties, making a continuous forest of peach-trees two miles back from the rivers.[194]
The peach-industry in Delaware seems to have begun, according to Mr. Charles Wright,[195] in 1832 at Delaware City, when a twenty-acre orchard of budded trees was set by Messrs. Reeves and Ridgeway, which by 1836 had increased to 110 acres. The receipts from this orchard in a single season were as much as $16,000, the fruit bringing in Philadelphia from $1.25 to $3 per three-peck basket. Other notable orchards of these early times mentioned by Mr. Wright are those of Major Philip Reybold and Sons who, beginning in 1835, by 1846 had 117,720 trees on 1090 acres near Delaware City from which 63,344 baskets of peaches were shipped in August, 1845; in Kent County, John Reed began planting as early as 1829 and several years later had 10,000 trees of Red Cheek Melocotons. In 1848 the peach-crop in Delaware was estimated at 5,000,000 baskets, chiefly from New Castle County. Peach-yellows, first a serious pest around Philadelphia about 1800, became epidemic in northern Delaware in 1842 and, little by little, the center of the peach-industry shifted southward from Middletown in the late sixties to Smyrna; a few years later it had reached Wyoming and in the nineties it was as far south as Bridgeville.
It is interesting to follow the ups and downs of the peach-industry in the Peninsula. Epidemics of yellows, a succession of cold winters, over-production, transportation difficulties or expense, San Jose scale, have all been factors powerful enough at various times to make or mar the fortunes of those engaged in growing peaches. Indeed, in following the history of this fruit on the Peninsula, one is forced to declare that peach-growing is gambling pure and simple. Take, for example, the building of the Delaware railroad. Peaches were scarcely planted in the interior parts of the Peninsula, away from water-ways, until the building of this road in the sixties and seventies, when the yield increased so rapidly that 4,175,500 baskets were shipped by rail in 1875, the total yield being 8,782,716 baskets[196]--fortunes followed the completion of the railroad only to be lost in subsequent over-production.
New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and southeastern New York rather slowly followed the lead of Delaware in commercial peach-growing. New Jersey, according to census reports, reached her zenith in peach-growing in 1899 when there were 4,413,568 peach-trees in the State which produced 2,746,607 bushels of fruit giving her third rank among the states of the Union in production. Ten years later the State had dropped to fourteenth. The peach seems to have been neglected in eastern Pennsylvania as a commercial crop, possibly because a good start was never made on account of the early appearance of yellows. In southeastern New York and on Long Island, peach-growers have usually followed the fortunes of their neighbors in New Jersey who have ever grown on a much larger scale.
To show how quickly the peach gives returns and how great the return from the capital invested, the following figures, savoring a good deal of American boastfulness of dollars and cents, are illustrative:[197] "The peach farms in Upper Delaware and Maryland have returned to their owners the most fabulous amounts for their investments far exceeding in profit any other staple crop that has been raised in the Middle States, and on a scale never before heard of in this or any other country. Some of the orchards containing from 1000 to 1300 acres have netted their owners from $20,000 to $30,000 annually. A peach orchard in New Castle county, Delaware, of 400 acres, netted the owner in one crop, $38,000. One in Kent county, Maryland, of some 600 acres, produced a crop paying $31,000, and the same orchard in 1879 yielded $42,000. In 1873, the Delaware Peach Growers' Association reported that there were sent from the Delaware peninsula to the northern markets of Philadelphia and New York 1,288,500 baskets of peaches, or 2577 car-loads by the railroad. Adding the quantity shipped by steamers and sailing vessels, and the amount canned, the actual quantity amounted, in the aggregate, to 2,000,000 of baskets. In 1872, the whole district, comprising the Eastern Shore of Maryland, marketed 3,500,000 baskets. The late Col. Wilkins, on Chester river, Kent county, Maryland, had 1350 acres in with peach trees, numbering 137,000, producing in bearing years from $30,000 to $40,000 annually."
Commercial peach-growing in the South is of recent development--its history is known to all pomologists of the present generation. It began in the seventies, the impetus being given by the introduction of a number of early, bright-colored, very showy peaches that could be marketed in northern cities in May and June. It took years, however, to develop means to send these peaches to market and it was not until in the nineties that the perfection of refrigerator cars and rapid transportation was such that the southern crop cut any figure in the peach-markets. The introduction of the Elberta in the seventies may be said to be another stone in the foundation of the peach-industry in the South. After Georgia became a factor in the culture of this fruit in America in the nineties, the State was followed in lesser degree, by South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Texas. In most of these southern states the peach-orchard is so near the cotton-plantation--often the two are interplanted--that the owners rob Peter to pay Paul in the care of the two crops. But this is not always the case, and at its best the southern peach-orchard is the consummate flower of modern commercial peach-growing.
The peach-industry in Connecticut is a recent development, as in the South. As late as 1880 the crop was negligible in the State; in 1889, 37,295 bushels were grown; 61,775 in 1899; and 417,918 bushels in 1909. This, considering the smallness of the State and the very uneven surface of much of it, is a rather remarkable development. Winter-killing, which takes place about one winter out of four, is the chief drawback but the high prices received from nearby markets make the peach, despite the occasional off-year, a profitable crop. Connecticut peaches are characterized by large size, bright color and good quality. From Connecticut the industry has spread into Massachusetts where all conditions are essentially the same.
Peach-growing in New York has never been spectacular. Along the lower Hudson before the Civil War and again a decade after it there was a thriving peach-industry such as there was in New Jersey and Delaware. A peach-industry is first of all dependent on quick transportation--the fruit must move. This meant in early days that there must be nearby markets and water transportation--western New York had the latter but not the former. Peaches, however, were early grown, in fact, as we have seen, were cultivated by the Indians, in the lake regions of western New York. In 1828 the Domestic Horticultural Society, the third such organization in America, was organized in Geneva, having for its field ten counties in western New York.[198] The Monroe County Horticultural Society was organized in 1830,[199] and in 1831 the Genesee Farmer and Gardener's Journal came into existence. These institutions bore fruit, more literally bore orchards, and a taste for horticulture, which, together with the nurseries that by this time were being established in the salubrious climate and excellent soil of western New York, gave a perfection in fruit-growing long unrivalled in America and now equalled only in California.
Of the history of commercial peach-growing in western New York, it can only be said that there has been such an industry since 1800. The product of the orchards of the first quarter-century went, for most part, to the brandy-still, for the second quarter it was used at home and for local markets and from then on, since 1850, or a little before, the region has been well to the front in the peach-markets of eastern United States. Changes in the commerce of the continent have made great changes in the peach-industry in New York. In 1825 the opening of the Erie Canal made western New York the granary of eastern United States--wheat was more profitable than peaches. Twenty-five years later millions of bushels of wheat from the plains, carried through the Great Lakes and the Erie Canal to the sea, began to drive wheat out of western New York and make the peach more profitable. This is a fine illustration of the fact that transportation is often as important a factor as soil or climate in the profitable production of a crop. Until figures were taken by census enumerators, the history of the peach-industry could be written only by giving innumerable items taken at random from newspapers of the times. The present status of peach-growing in this region is to be discussed in a future chapter.
Another large commercial peach-region is to be found along the shore of Lake Erie in Ohio. The peach has been cultivated very generally in Ohio since the first settlements there more than a century ago and the industry assumed commercial importance in a dozen or more centers as early, at least, as 1867, when the assessors' returns showed a total crop for the State of 1,402,849 bushels.[200] But what is now known as the peach-belt along the shores of Lake Erie is largely a growth of comparatively recent times, much of the land now covered with peach-orchards having been originally planted to vineyards. Possibly the region was at its zenith in the nineties, the plantings here contributing greatly to putting Ohio in third place at this time among the states of the Union in the production of peaches.
Michigan furnishes an interesting chapter in the history of the peach-industry. The industry was started in what is now the Michigan peach-belt by an Indian trader who planted a pit in 1775 near St. Joseph. From this tree sprang seedling orchards, one of which, near Douglas at the mouth of the Kalamazoo River, numbered 300 trees. There were no budded trees until 1834. A conjunction of several factors now gave peach-growing a tremendous impetus in the State. Chicago, growing with leaps and bounds, demanded peaches; the soil and climate of western Michigan were found to be ideal for this fruit; between the supply and demand was quick and cheap transportation by water. Shipments began in 1834 to Chicago and, as this and other western cities grew, peach-planting in Michigan progressed as probably never before in any other part of the world. In the seventies peach-yellows swept like a wave of fire over the southern portion of what is now the belt, driving the industry northward until at Traverse City the peach reached its highest northern limit in the eastern states. With better control of the yellows, peach-orchards were again planted in the southern parts of the belt and the industry continues to thrive, though with the ups and downs incident to this fruit wherever grown.
Another large peach-growing area lies in southern Illinois extending across the Mississippi into Missouri and Kansas. Westward, in Colorado, Utah, California, Oregon and Washington, are the world's newest peach-orchards, all of which have arisen to commercial importance within recent times. In southern Illinois and Missouri, however, even before the Civil War, peach-growing had assumed sufficient magnitude to be called an industry. The present standing of these later peach-areas may best be compared with that of the older regions by a tabulated report from the United States Census Reports which is herewith printed. In the fluctuating figures of this table one sees the exploitation of the peach. What other tree-crop in the whole world could show more ups and downs in the brief space of thirty years? No state holds first rank two decades in succession; in fifteen states in 1910 there were more trees not of bearing age than there were in bearing; there were more peach-trees in the United States in 1900 than in 1910; the figures most graphically attest the shifting of peach-regions; decreasing numbers represent misfortunes--most often yellows, or San Jose scale, a freeze, or overproduction; increasing numbers stand for a newly discovered advantage. By these tokens we better realize the speculative nature of peach-growing.
PEACH-PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES, 1890-1910
====================================================================== | Number of trees of bearing age | Trees not | | of bearing States +----------+----------+-----------+ age, | Eleventh | Twelfth |Thirteenth |Thirteenth | Census, | Census, | Census, | Census, | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | 1910 ----------------------+----------+----------+-----------+------------- New England: | | | | Maine | 1,607| 9,592| 5,102 | 3,320 New Hampshire | 19,057| 48,819| 57,571 | 35,213 Vermont | 1,966| 4,993| 5,492 | 2,187 Massachusetts | 87,004| 301,405| 154,592 | 162,114 Rhode Island | 11,816| 48,063| 39,342 | 30,795 Connecticut | 88,655| 522,726| 461,711 | 338,608 Middle Atlantic: | | | | New York | 1,014,110| 2,522,729| 2,457,187 | 2,216,907 New Jersey | 4,413,568| 2,746,607| 1,216,476 | 1,363,632 Pennsylvania | 1,146,342| 3,521,930| 2,383,027 | 2,179,386 East North Central: | | | | Ohio | 1,882,191| 6,363,127| 3,133,368 | 2,092,300 Indiana | 953,980| 2,925,526| 2,130,298 | 1,145,479 Illinois | 783,910| 2,448,013| 2,860,120 | 739,358 Michigan | 1,919,104| 8,104,415| 2,907,170 | 2,991,090 Wisconsin | 387| 6,967| 4,163 | 4,148 West North Central: | | | | Minnesota | 334| 1,626| 1,571 | 3,837 Iowa | 82,238| 516,145| 1,090,749 | 283,308 Missouri | 1,999,474| 4,557,365| 6,588,034 | 1,404,429 North Dakota | ..... | 2| 90 | 604 South Dakota | 78| 1,080| 1,815 | 5,259 Nebraska | 144,701| 1,055,959| 1,188,373 | 263,882 Kansas | 4,876,311| 5,098,064| 4,394,894 | 620,709 South Atlantic: | | | | Delaware | 4,521,623| 2,441,650| 1,177,402 | 212,117 Maryland | 6,113,287| 4,017,854| 1,497,724 | 805,063 District of Columbia| 1,521| 149| 330 | 1 Virginia | 1,218,219| 1,939,113| 1,585,505 | 780,551 West Virginia | 450,440| 1,695,642| 1,424,582 | 1,441,188 North Carolina | 2,133,004| 2,773,788| 2,661,791 | 861,042 South Carolina | 711,138| 1,136,790| 1,336,142 | 349,790 Georgia | 2,787,546| 7,668,639|10,609,119 | 1,531,367 Florida | 235,936| 354,208| 290,850 | 156,782 East South Central: | | | | Kentucky | 1,205,866| 2,884,193| 2,245,402 | 1,110,744 Tennessee | 2,347,699| 2,749,203| 3,163,737 | 1,190,727 Alabama | 1,280,842| 2,690,151| 3,177,331 | 838,866 Mississippi | 878,569| 1,856,748| 1,726,298 | 724,895 ----------------------+----------+----------+-----------+-------------
PEACH-PRODUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES 1890-1910--Continued
====================================================================== | Number of trees of bearing age | Trees not | | of bearing States +----------+----------+-----------+ age, | Eleventh | Twelfth |Thirteenth |Thirteenth | Census, | Census, | Census, | Census, | 1890 | 1900 | 1910 | 1910 ----------------------+----------+----------+-----------+------------- West South Central: | | | | Arkansas | 2,769,052| 4,062,218| 6,859,962 | 2,884,927 Louisiana | 317,132| 758,877| 903,352 | 316,132 Oklahoma | 206| 5,848,808| 4,783,825 | 2,574,680 Texas | 4,486,901| 7,248,358| 9,737,827 | 2,958,813 Mountain: | | | | Montana | .... | 1,670| 538 | 3,386 Idaho | 13,639| 79,757| 73,080 | 212,995 Wyoming | .... | 9| 46 | 419 Colorado | 8,204| 31,998| 793,372 | 606,001 New Mexico | 23,081| 117,003| 136,191 | 184,466 Arizona | 24,954| 67,073| 51,415 | 32,562 Utah | 68,121| 409,665| 544,314 | 651,233 Nevada | 3,996| 9,136| 6,329 | 5,049 Pacific: | | | | Washington | 72,701| 226,636| 536,875 | 1,028,141 Oregon | 115,244| 281,716| 273,162 | 508,179 California | 2,669,843| 7,472,393| 7,829,011 | 4,409,562 +----------+----------+-----------+-------------- Total |53,885,597|99,916,598|94,506,657 | 42,266,243 =======================================================================
NEW TYPES OF PEACHES
The capacity of species to split into types, using types in a broad sense, is, we all agree, one of the greatest assets of cultivated plants. Through diversity of types come adaptabilities to soils and climates and variety in the crop, to mention but two of the essentials of standard crop-plants. New types afford the material from which greatest progress comes in fruit-growing. In common with all fruit-growing, peach-growing has received impetus from time to time from the introduction of new and distinct types. In the middle of the Nineteenth Century, three previously unknown types of peaches, each divisible into horticultural varieties, were brought to America. All three have had important effects on the peach-industry in America.
North China peaches.--Not very distinct from the Persian peaches at the outset, its outliers running into some of the other groups as well, "North China" is now but little more than a name for a conglomerate lot of varieties grown everywhere in America except in the sub-tropic parts of the Gulf States. The North China race includes varieties characterized by fruits of large size, great beauty, tender skin and flesh, good quality and vigorous trees which bear abundantly and regularly. The group has received careful study at the Delaware Experiment Station, an account of it by G. Harold Powell having been published in the Thirteenth Annual Report from that Station in 1901. Powell prefers to call the group Chinese Cling rather than North China.
The peaches put in the North China group are so nearly akin to those in the Persian group that it is difficult to place varieties. All agree, however, in taking the European Shanghai, the American Chinese Cling, as the type-variety and, though it is probable that travelers or missionaries brought pits of some of these peaches from northern China a century or more ago, the known history of the group begins with the variety just named as the type. It is a pleasure to give Robert Fortune, the indefatigable collector of Chinese plants for the London Horticultural Society, credit for introducing these peaches into western countries. In 1844 Fortune collected a fine, large, delicious peach near Shanghai and in the autumn forwarded pits and a plant in a pot to London. The pits were sown and the seedlings produced fruit in 1852 and from among these a sort was selected and called Shanghai.[201] Pits from this first collection were probably sent to France, for the name appears in the early fifties in the pomological literature of this country.
The first American reference to the Shanghai is found in 1851[202] when fruits were exhibited at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston by R. Choate with the statement "peach from a tree imported from Shanghai." More definite are the facts of an importation made by Charles Downing in 1850. Early in that year Downing received potted peach-trees from the British consul at Shanghai under the names "Chinese Cling" and "Shanghai," supposed to be two sorts but proving to be identical. One of these trees was sent to Mr. Henry Lyons, Columbia, South Carolina, and this bore fruit in 1851.[203] From Downing's stock the variety was quickly and widely distributed and the horticultural magazines of the time gave the new peaches wide publicity, so that, from this and other importations which were made from time to time by various persons, these peaches from northern China were universally grown in the peach-orchards of America within a quarter of a century of their introduction.
South China peaches.--Those who have read the descriptions of Chinese peaches in Chapter 1 (pages 14 to 21) recognize at once the beaked varieties of South China, especially those growing about Canton. These peaches, common enough in China and cultivated there for centuries, reached occidental countries only in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. They came to America as seeds from Dr. J. T. Devan, Canton, China, to Mr. John Caldwell, Newburg, New York,[204] and were introduced into Europe probably by M. Montigny, French Consul at Shanghai, who sent seeds to the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1852.[205] In recent years a number of fresh importations of seeds and plants of these honey-flavored, beaked peaches have been made by the United States Department of Agriculture.
A composite picture of South China peaches shows the following characters:
Tree of medium size, upright-spreading; branches leaving the trunk at an angle of about fifty degrees and curving upward; buds quite prominent; flowers always large and very abundant, pale pink, base of petals darker pink; leaves small, long, narrow, pointed, finely serrate, conduplicate, distributed all along the limb, dark green, in fall slightly tinged with red. Fruit small, oval, yellow or white blushed with red, slightly flattened; skin adhering to the flesh; suture very deep in basin, but does not extend more than one-third the way down; apex long and recurved; flesh white or yellow; flavor a peculiar honey-sweet; stone free or cling, long-pointed, generally curved.
As yet these honey-flavored peaches are grown commercially only in the Gulf States, the notion prevailing that they cannot be grown in the North. Quite to the contrary they do exceedingly well as far north as Geneva, though undesirable because of smallness of fruit and lateness in ripening. Of the score of the descendants of the original Honey, several are in bearing on the Station grounds, Climax, Imperial, Pallas and Triana being illustrated in The Peaches of New York. All but two or three of the varieties that are put in this group originated in Florida and most of them come from the grounds of G. L. Taber, Glen Saint Mary, of that State. An excellent bulletin, No. 73, from the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, published in 1904, by F. C. Reimer, gives a full account of these peaches.
Is the beaked character permanent? That regions in time give rise to racial strains must have occurred to all who have read the preceding pages. The peach acquires distinct varietal characters in every great geographical region in which it is grown. Possibly in no other character is the change greater than in the long, pointed, erect or recurved apex in common parlance called the beak. As a rule, the farther south the more pronounced is the beak and the more oblong is the fruit. In this respect, southern peaches, taking them as a whole, are as markedly different from New York peaches as are the long, crowned, angular-topped apples of the Pacific Northwest from the rotund fruits of the Atlantic Northeast. The four sorts of honey-flavored peaches described and illustrated in The Peaches of New York, named in the foregoing paragraph, illustrate this well, none of them being nearly so abruptly conical as specimens coming to us from the South. Peaches in China, evidently, show the same modification, for those discussed in the previous group are as markedly rotund as those in this group are conic and beaked. It is a fair inference, then, that the beaked character of the peach, counting time in generations of the tree, is permanent only in southern climates.
Peento peaches.--Another group of these Chinese peaches, not very different from the South China varieties we have just given an account of, is composed of the score or more sorts showing relationship to the variety, Peento. These may be rather indefinitely described as follows:
Tree large, vigorous, upright-spreading; branches willow-like, branching at an angle of about forty degrees; flowers large, pink, opening early, often at a low temperature and very irregularly; leaves narrow, long, finely serrated, with reniform glands; inclined to be evergreen; fruit sub-globose except in Peento which is flattened endwise; skin white and mottled with carmine, parting readily from the flesh; flesh white or yellow; flavor sweet, with a peculiar almond taste; stone occasionally flattened endwise, either free or cling. This race is adapted to sub-tropical parts of the Gulf States where it ripens from May 1st to June 1st.
The Peento, which gives name to this group, is without doubt a descendant of the flat peaches of China, common enough as we have seen. The first tree, however, came from Java to England where it was first grown by John Braddick under the name Java peach.[206] William Prince,[207] Flushing, Long Island, imported the variety to America some time previous to 1828 and grew it to the number of twenty trees. The peaches from Prince's importation seem to have been lost and the variety did not appear again in America until 1869 when P. J. Berckmans,[208] Augusta, Georgia, brought seed from China, from one of which came the Peento. Peento peaches in America are peculiar to Florida, where all of the score or more varieties but the Peento have originated. This group of peaches has been well described by H. Harold Hume in Bulletin 62 of the Florida Experiment Station from which the description given above is an adaptation.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] De Candolle, Alphonse Or. Cult. Plants 222. 1885.
[2] Meyer, Frank N. U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants =No. 107=:862. 1915.
[3] Feb. 4, 1916.
[4] De Candolle, Alphonse Or. Cult. Plants 228. 1885.
[5] Chinese Literature, Edited by Epiphanius Wilson Bk. I:126. 1902.
[6] Ibid. Bk. IX:148, 149. 1902.
[7] Ibid. Bk. XIII:161. 1902.
[8] Cibot, Pierre Martial Mém. concernant l'hist. les sciences etc. des Chinois. =II=:280-293. 1777.
[9] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants. =No. 102=:823-825. 1914.
[10] Knight Thomas Andrew Trans. Hort. Soc. Lond. =3=:1. 1820.
[11] Gard. Chron. 531. 1856.
[12] Gard. Chron. 27. 1863.
[13] Darwin Ans. and Pls. Domest. =1=:357. 1868.
[14] Carrière, E. A. Variétés De Pêchers 25-33. 1867.
[15] De Candolle, Alphonse Or. Cult. Plants 229. 1885.
[16] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =227=:20. 1911.
[17] Ibid. =227=:47. 1911.
[18] Ibid. =233=:76. 1912.
[19] Ibid. =233=:77. 1912.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid. =233=:78. 1912.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid. =233=:80. 1912.
[25] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =242=:27. 1912.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid. =207=:62. 1911.
[28] Ibid. =233=:76. 1912.
[29] Ibid. =233=:78. 1912.
[30] Ibid.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Ibid. =106=:26. 1907.
[33] Ibid. =132=:80. 1908.
[34] U. S. D. A. Bul. of For. Pl. Int. =No. 32=:19. 1910.
[35] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =233=:77. 1912.
[36] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Inv. of S & P. I. 21. 1915.
[37] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =66=:95. 1905.
[38] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Inv. of S. & P. I. 32. 1914.
[39] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =106=:50. 1907.
[40] Ibid. =137=:31. 1909.
[41] Ibid. =233=:78. 1912.
[42] Ibid. =137=:31. 1909.
[43] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants =No. 59=:404. 1911.
[44] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =66=:102. 1905.
[45] Ibid. =233=:80 1912.
[46] Ibid. =233=:80. 1912.
[47] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants =103=:828. 1914.
[48] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =66=:189. 1905.
[49] Ibid. =66=:306. 1905.
[50] Ibid. =142=:21. 1909.
[51] Ibid. =66=:95. 1905.
[52] Ibid. =66=:95. 1905.
[53] Ibid.
[54] Ibid.
[55] Ibid. =233=:47. 1912
[56] Ibid. =242=:12. 1912.
[57] U. S. D. A. Bu. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =137=:31. 1909.
[58] Ibid.
[59] Ibid. =137=:46. 1909.
[60] Ibid. =66=:191. 1905.
[61] Ibid. =162=:50. 1909
[62] Ibid.
[63] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants =51=:4. 1910.
[64] Ibid. =60=:411. 1911.
[65] Ibid. =60=:412. 1911.
[66] Ibid. =62=:431. 1911.
[67] M. Cibot, a French missionary, writing nearly a century and a half ago in his memoirs concerning the Chinese (=II=:280-293. 1784), gives the following account of peaches with which he was familiar in China at that time:--
"Peaches are distinguished by size and color, the shape and earliness of their fruit. There are some whose flesh is white, some greenish, some a delicate yellow, some a yellow orange and some marble; some are round, some oval, some lengthened to a point like a crow's beak. Peaches are heard of weighing two pounds or even more. The largest ones I have seen were scarcely three and a half inches in length and diameter; as to earliness, in the middle provinces there are peaches almost as soon as cherries. It is still more astonishing that some varieties do not ripen here till October, and that there is a secret by which they can be kept till January, just as fresh, just as beautiful, and just as delicious as if right off the tree."
[68] Ikeda, T. The Fruit Culture in Japan 32, 33. 1907.
[69] Loureiro, Fl. Cochin. 315.
[70] Royle, Illust. Bot. Himal. 204.
[71] Hooker, Sir Joseph, Jour. of Bot. 54. 1850.
[72] Hendricks, P. J. P. U. S. D. A. Bur. Pl. Ind. Bul. =97=:72. 1905.
[73] Meyer, F. W. U. S. D. A. Bur. Pl. Ind. Bul. =132=:80. 1908.
[74] Montreal Hort. Soc. Rpt. =12=:64, 65. 1886-87.
[75] Schuyler, Eugene Turkestan =1=:296, 297. 1876.
[76] Lansdell, Henry Russian Central Asia =1=:223. 1885.
[77] Lansdell, Henry Russian Central Asia =1=:277. 1885.
[78] Ibid. =1=:608. 1885.
[79] Ibid. =2=:83. 1885.
[80] Bostock and Riley Nat. History of Pliny =3=:296. 1855.
[81] Bostock and Riley Nat. History of Pliny =3=:296. 1855.
[82] Ibid. =3=:293, 294. 1855.
[83] De Candolle Alphonse Or. Cult. Plants 225. 1885.
[84] Duhamel Du Monceau Trait. Arb. Fr. =2=:1-2. 1768.
[85] Leroy Dict. Pom. =6=:10. 1879.
[86] Bostock and Riley Nat. History of Pliny =4=:508. 1856.
[87] Leroy Dict. Pom. =6=:10. 1879.
[88] Cecil, Hon. Mrs. Evelyn A Hist. of Gard. in Eng. 3. 1910.
[89] Ibid. 38. 1910.
[90] Ibid. 48. 1910.
[91] Gerarde Herball 1446, 1447. 1633.
[92] Parkinson Par. Ter. 580, 582. 1629.
[93] This early Spanish publication is to be found in the Library of Congress under the title Molina's Vocubalario en Lengua Castellana y Mexicana (1571). Mr. W. E. Safford, economic botanist in the United States Department of Agriculture, has been kind enough to translate Molina's reference to the peach. Mr. Safford writes:--
"On page 83a (the pages of Molina are numbered only on one side, and this is the reverse of page 83) I find as a definition of the fruit of Melocoton (Peach) the following:--xuchipal durazno (red peach), cuztic durazno (yellow peach), xocotl melocoton (plum peach). I translate xocotl "plum", because the Mexicans applied this word to many plum-like fruits, or fruits more or less acid in distinction to tzapotl, the general term applied to sweet soft fruits. The words cited are all hybrid compounds of Nahuatl and Spanish. Whatever may be the value of these citations, they establish the fact that the peach was undoubtedly introduced into Mexico before 1571."
[94] Explorations and Surveys for a Railroad Route from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean, War Department =3=:122. 1854.
[95] Bul. Tor. Bot. Club =12=:85-86. Aug. 1885.
[96] Hilton, William, A Relation of a Discovery lately made on the Coasts of Florida. 1664, Force Hist. Tracts. IV: =No. 2=:8.
[97] Bartram, William Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida 343. 1791.
[98] Bartram, William Travels through North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida 405. 1791.
[99] Ibid. 421. 1791.
[100] Kalm, Peter Travels into North America =3=:127. 1771.
Peter Kalm is so often mentioned in the fruit-books published by this Station that readers are entitled to know something about him. Kalm was a Swede, born in 1715, died in 1779, who was sent by the Swedish government to travel in North America. He landed in 1748 and spent the next three years in travel in the settled parts of the New World devoting himself to the study of the plant and animal life, the natural phenomena, resources and agriculture of the Middle and Northern States and Canada. On his return to Sweden, Kalm published an account of his travels in America which was afterward translated into German and then into English. To him we are indebted for much valuable information in regard to the beginnings of agriculture and horticulture in the middle of the Eighteenth Century in America. Kalm was a student of Linnaeus and the great botanist perpetuated his memory by naming our beautiful mountain laurel, Kalmia.
[101] Le Page Du Pratz, Hist. La. =2=:17. 1763.
[102] Hennepin Nouvelle découverte d'un très grand pays etc., etc. 300. 1697.
[103] Kalm, Peter Travels into North America =3=:79. 1771.
[104] Nuttall, Thomas A Journal of Travels into the Arkansa Territory During the Year 1819, 79. 1821.
[105] Ibid. 101. 1821.
[106] Lawson, John History of Carolina, 181-183. 1714. Reprinted at Raleigh, 1860. Lawson's History of Carolina contains the best description of the natural resources of the southern Atlantic seaboard published in colonial times. It is a book of nature rather than of history and one of fascinating interest which cannot be read without admiring and loving the author and mourning his sad fate. Poor Lawson was burned at the stake by the Indians in 1711. We cannot refrain from quoting his description of North Carolina as printed on page 79 of his history: "A delicious country, being placed in that girdle of the world which affords wine, oil, fruit, grain, and silk, with other rich commodities, besides a sweet air, moderate climate, and fertile soil. These are the blessings, under Heaven's protection, that spin out the thread of life to its utmost extent, and crown our days with the sweets of health and plenty, which, when joined with content, render the possessors the happiest race of men upon earth."
[107] Works of Captain John Smith, Ed. by Edward Arber, 887. 1884.
[108] De Vries, David Peterson Voyages from Holland to America 50. 1853.
[109] Neil, Rev. E. D. Virginia Carolorum 50. 1869.
[110] Evelyn, Robert New Albion, Force Hist. Tracts. =II=: No. =7=:31.
[111] Norwood, Col. A Voyage to Virginia, Force Hist. Tracts, =III=:No. =10=:5.
[112] Hammond, John Leah and Rachel or The Two Fruitful Sisters of Virginia and Maryland 1656, Force Hist. Tracts, =III=:No. =14=:13.
[113] Works of Capt. John Smith Ed. by Edward Arber, 886. 1884.
[114] Bruce, Philip Alexander Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century =1=:468, 469.
[115] Beverly, Robert History of Virginia. 259, 260. 1722. Reprinted in Richmond 1855.
[116] A New and Accurate Account of the Provinces of South Carolina and Georgia. Reprinted in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society. =1=:50-51. 1840.
[117] An Impartial Inquiry into the State and Utility of the Province of Georgia. Reprinted in Collections of the Georgia Historical Society =1=:199. 1840.
[118] Oldmixon, John The British Empire in America 2nd Ed. =1=:515. 1741.
[119] Oldmixon, John The British Empire in America 2nd Ed. London. =1=:440. 1741.
[120] Watson Annals of Phila. =1=:46. 1856.
[121] Raum, John O. History of New Jersey, 108.
[122] Watson Annals of Phila. =1=:46. 1856.
[123] Acrelius, Israel The History of New Sweden, or the Settlements on the River Delaware. Stockholm, 1759. Translated from the Swedish by William M. Reynolds, D. D., Philadelphia, 1876, Vol. XI of the Memoirs of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania 151, 152.
[124] Kalm, Peter Travels into North America =1=:71-73. 1770.
[125] Kalm, Peter Travels into North America =1=:94. 1770.
[126] Ibid. =1=:222-223. 1770.
[127] Kalm, Peter Travels into North America =2=:244, 245. 1771.
[128] Mss. in the library of Hobart College, Geneva, N. Y.
[129] David Thomas is now scarcely known in horticulture except as he is spoken of as the father of America's well-known agricultural, horticultural and pomological writer, John Jacob Thomas. Yet the father merits recognition for his work in agriculture and horticulture. David Thomas was a Quaker, born in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1776. He became a civil engineer and moved to Aurora, Cayuga County, New York, in 1805 and began to practice his profession. Later he became one of the engineers in charge of the construction of the Erie Canal and still later performed a similar service in building the Welland Canal. Soon after, we find him a nurseryman and fruit-grower at Aurora. Throughout his entire life, his son writes, he was interested in horticulture, pomology and botany and by his writings on these subjects, published principally in the Genesee Farmer, then the leading agricultural paper in western New York, and in Travels in the Western Country in 1816, published in Auburn in 1819, David Thomas performed most valuable services in forwarding the cultivation of fruits. He was a corresponding member of the London Horticultural Society and of the Linnaean Society of Paris. His articles in the Genesee Farmer and other agricultural papers furnish the most authoritative statements we have in regard to the early history of fruit-growing in western New York. The name of David Thomas ought long to be preserved by horticulturists of the State and country together with that of his illustrious son, John Jacob Thomas.
[130] Mass. Records =1=:24.
[131] Mass. Hist. Collections 4th Ser. =VI=:499.
[132] History of the Mass. Hort. Soc. 16. 1829-1878.
[133] Hist. Mass. Hort. Soc. 17. 1829-1878.
[134] Darlington, Wm. Memorials of Bartram 81. 1849.
[135] Ibid. 93. 1849.
[136] Ibid. 177. 1849.
[137] John Kenrick, one of the pioneer nurserymen on American soil, began his business career by raising peach-seedlings. His nursery was situated in the towns of Newton and Brighton, Massachusetts, and was founded in 1790. As we have stated in the text, he early acquired the art of budding and possibly was the first, or at least one of the first, nurserymen to offer budded peach-trees for sale. In 1823, he advertised in the New England Farmer thirty varieties of budded peaches five to eight feet high at thirty-three and one-third cents each. These thirty varieties must have included practically all of the named sorts then grown in America. It is interesting to note that he states in the advertisement that the trees were packed with clay and mats. It was in this year that William Kenrick, son of John Kenrick, became a partner of his father. Beside growing peaches, the Kenrick nurseries offered for sale other trees, vine and bush-fruits and ornamentals as well. The Kenricks were also extensive growers of currants from which they made currant-wine, their output in 1824 being 1700 gallons; in 1825, 3000 gallons and in 1826, 3600 gallons. The date and place of John Kenrick's birth cannot be learned. His death occurred in 1833 in the Kenrick mansion, built in 1720, standing near the nurseries. New England, and peach-growers everywhere, owe him a debt of gratitude for his services in horticulture.
[138] William Kenrick, son of John, of whom we have just written, was born in 1795 in the family mansion on Nonantum Hill in the town of Newton, Massachusetts. He was trained by his father as a nurseryman and in 1823 became a partner in the Kenrick nurseries, of which he soon after appears to have assumed control. The Kenrick nurseries, at this time, were probably the most extensive and the best known of any in New England. Besides growing the fruit-bearing plants of the time and such ornamentals as were then to be found in America, the Kenricks seem to have taken an enthusiastic part in the craze for the Lombardy Poplar which was then raging in America. The elder Kenrick must have been one of the early growers of this popular plant for in 1797 two acres of his nursery was appropriated to the Lombardy Poplar. The son, in his turn an enthusiast, succumbed to the silk-culture fad and seems in 1835 to have been one of the leading growers of the mulberry, Morus multicaulus for feeding silkworms. In this year Mr. Kenrick published the American Silk Growers Guide, which is, in essence, a treatise on mulberry-culture. William Kenrick's most notable pomological achievement, however, was the publication of the New American Orchardist which appeared in 1833. While not the best of the pomological manuals of the time, it is a valuable contribution to American pomology because of its full descriptions of the fruits of that date. Beginning with his father in 1823, William Kenrick continued in the nursery business for twenty-seven years, probably growing, importing and disposing of more fruit and ornamental trees than any other nurseryman in New England during this time. He died in February, 1872, at the ripe age of 77, having lived to see the orchards planted from his nursery come to full fruition and every part of New England made more beautiful by the ornamental trees and shrubs grown under his care.
[139] Hist. Mass. Hort. Soc. 33. 1880.
[140] Willich Dom. Enc. =4=:244-246. 1803.
[141] Am. Farmer =1=:406, 407. 1821.
[142] Parkinson A Tour in America =1=:212-219. 1805.
[143] An interesting account of peach-culture in Egypt is to be found in Agr'l Jour. of Egypt 3:=Pt. 2=:134-137. 1914.
[144] A Voyage to Virginia Force's Hist. Tracts 3: =No. 5=:10.
[145] U. S. D. A. Invent. of Seeds and Plants =No. 32=:14. 1914.
[146] Transvaal Agr. Journal =No. 10, 3=:336. 1905.
[147] Darwin, Charles Voy. of a Nat. =1=:154.
[148] Bertero, Ann. Sc. Nat. 2=1=:350.
[149] Oakenfull, J. C. Brazil 358. 1913.
[150] Wight, W. F. Proc. Soc. Hort. Sci. =10=:122-133, 1913.
[151] Agr. Journal of the Cape of Good Hope No. 2, =27=:197. 1905.
[152] Boucher, W. A. Con. New Zeal. Fruit Growers 89. 1901.
[153] U. S. D. A. Bur. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =137=:31. 1909.
[154] Ibid. =137=:48. 1909.
[155] Ibid.
[156] U. S. D. A. Bur. of Pl. Ind. Bul. =162=:50. 1909.
[157] U. S. D. A. Invent. of Seeds and Plants =No. 32=:14. 1914.
[158] U. S. D. A. Bul. of For. Plant Int. =No. 60=:411. 1911.
[159] Ibid. =No. 60=:412. 1911.
[160] U. S. D. A. Bur. of For. Plant Int. =No. 60=:431. 1911.
[161] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants =No. 113=:920. 1911.
[162] Ibid. =No. 114=:929. 1911.
[163] Wickson, E. J. Cal. Fruits 308. 1889.
[164] Gregory, C. T. Cornell Bul. =365=:219-220. 1915.
[165] Trait. Arb. Fr. 35. 1807.
[166] Darwin Ans. and Pls. Domest. 2nd Ed. =2=:217. 1893.
[167] Hedrick, U. P. Science =37=:917. 1913.
[168] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants No. =106=:858. 1915.
[169] Trans. Hort. Soc. Lond. =3=:1. 1820; =4=:396. 1822.
[170] See Duhamel Traite Arb. Ed. 2, IV: 112. 1809; Seringe in DC. Prodr. II: 531. 1825; Reichenback Fl. Ger. Exc. 647. 1830-32.
[171] De Candolle Or. Cult. Plants, 225. 1885.
[172] Commentaries on Dioscorides, French Ed. of 1572. 159-160.
[173] Parkinson Par. Ter. 582, 583. 1629.
"I presume that the name Nucipersica doth most rightly belong unto that kinde of Peach, which we call Nectorins, and although they have beene with us not many yeares, yet have they beene knowne both in Italy to Matthiolus, and others before him, who it seemeth knew no other then the yellow Nectorin, as Dalechampius also: But we at this day doe know five severall sorts of Nectorins, as they shall be presently set downe; and as in the former fruits, so in this, I will give you the description of one, and briefe notes of the rest.
The Nectorin is a tree of no great bignesse, most usually lesser then the Peach tree, his body and elder boughes being whitish, the younger branches very red, whereon grow narrow long greene leaves, so like unto Peach leaves, that none can well distinguish them, unlesse it be in this, that they are somewhat lesser: the blossomes are all reddish, as the Peach, but one of a differing fashion from all the other, as I shall shew you by and by: the fruit that followeth is smaller, rounder, and smoother than Peaches, without any cleft on the side, and without any douny cotton or freeze at all; and herein is like unto the outer greene rinde of the Wallnut, whereof as I am perswaded it tooke the name, of a fast and firme meate, and very delicate in taste, especially the best kindes, with a rugged stone within it, and a bitter kernell.
The Muske Nectorin, so called, because it being a kinde of the best red Nectorins, both smelleth and eateth as if the fruit were steeped in Muske: some thinke that this and the next Romane Nectorin are all one.
The Romane red Nectorin, or cluster Nectorin, hath a large or great purplish blossome, like unto a Peach, reddish at the bottome on the outside, and greenish within: the fruit is of a fine red colour on the outside, and groweth in clusters, two or three at a joynt together, of an excellent good taste.
The bastard red Nectorin hath a smaller or pincking blossome, more like threads then leaves, neither so large nor open as the former, and yellowish within at the bottome: the fruit is red on the outside, and groweth never but one at a joynt; it is a good fruit, but eateth a little more rawish then the other, even when it is full ripe.
The yellow Nectorin is of two sorts, the one an excellent fruit, mellow, and of a very good rellish; the other hard, and no way comparable to it.
The greene Nectorin, great and small; for such I have seene abiding constant, although both planted in one ground: they are both of one goodnesse, and accounted with most to be the best rellished Nectorin of all others.
The white Nectorin is said to bee differing from the other, in that it will bee more white on the outside when it is ripe, then either the yellow or greene: but I have not yet seene it.
The Use of Nectorins.
The fruit is more firme then the Peach, and more delectable in taste; and is therefore of more esteeme, and that worthily."
[174] Darwin Ans. and Pls. Domest. 2nd Ed. =1=:357-365. 1893.
[175] Bretschneider E. Bot. Explor. in China =2=:860. 1898.
[176] Gard. and For. =1=:153. 1888.
[177] Bretschneider E. Bot. Explor. in China =2=:860. 1898.
[178] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants No. =115=:940. 1915
[179] U. S. D. A. Plant Immigrants No. =72=:516. 1912.
[180] Prunus Davidiana alba Bean Garden =50=:165. 1896; Persica Davidiana alba Carrière Rev. Hort. 76. 1872; Prunus Davidiana flore alba Wittmack Gartenfl. =44=:129. 1895.
[181] Jour. Agr. Research =1=:147-177. 1913.
[182] U. S. D. A. Seeds and Plants Imported Invent. =13=:173. 1908.
[183] Trans. Hort. Soc. Lond. =3=:380-387. 1820.
[184] Ibid. =5=:525-560. 1824.
[185] For a brief history of the life and pomological work of Gilbert Onderdonk, the reader is referred to The Plums of New York, page 392.
[186] U. S. D. A. Rpt. 648-651. 1887.
[187] Tex. Sta. Bul. =39=:826-832. 1896.
[188] Am. Pom. Soc. Rpt. 110. 1887.
[189] Waugh, F. A. Systematic Pomology, 178. 1903.
[190] Hume H. Harold Fla. Sta. Bul. =62=: 1902.
[191] Gould, H. P. Md. Sta. Bul. =72=:129. 1901.
[192] Wright, Charles Cyc. of Am. Hort. =3=:1240. 1900.
[193] Gould, H. P. Md. Sta. Bul. =72=:130. 1901.
[194] Shallcross, J. T. Md. Hort. Soc. Rpt. =1=:17. 1898.
[195] Wright, Charles Cyc. of Am. Hort. =3=:1238. 1900.
[196] Am. Farmer July, 1878.
[197] Rutter Cult. & Diseases of the Peach 81, 82. 1880.
[198] New England Farmer =7=:174.
[199] Mag. Hort. =5=:12.
[200] Ohio Hort. Soc. Rpt. 61. 1869.
[201] Jour. Lond. Hort. Soc. 221. 1846; l. c. 265. 1852.
[202] Mag. Hort. 475. 1851.
[203] Horticulturalist 286, 472. 1853.
[204] Horticulturist =1=:382. 1847.
[205] Rev. Hort. 11. 1861.
[206] Trans. Hort. Soc. Lond. =4=:512-513. 1822.
[207] Prince, Wm. Treat. on Hort. 16. 1828.
William Prince, second of the name in American pomology and third proprietor of the celebrated Prince nurseries at Flushing, Long Island, was born November 10, 1766, and died April 9, 1842. His grandfather, a French Huguenot, was the founder of the establishment of which he became owner, and in which he made his reputation. Under his father, the first William Prince, the nursery at Flushing developed into a great commercial nursery, a private experiment station, a testing ground for American and foreign fruits and a botanic garden of American plants. The mantle dropped by William Prince, the father, at his death in 1802, fell upon the shoulders of William Prince, subject of this sketch, then just reaching the prime of life and one of the most brilliant and versatile pomologists the country has known. William Prince continued most successfully the work of his father in breeding new varieties, domesticating native plants and importing foreign fruits and ornamentals. During his supervision the Prince Nursery reached the height of its fame. It was conducted less for money than for love of the work. An attempt was made to grow every American and European plant-species having horticultural value. The catalogs published from the nursery by William Prince are among the best horticultural and botanical contributions of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. Besides these, William Prince is the author of the Treatise on Horticulture, published in 1828, and gave assistance to his son, William Robert Prince, in preparing his Pomological Manual published in 1832. In the description of varieties in this text it will be found that many varieties of peaches were originated, introduced, imported or first described by William Prince.
[208] For a brief history of the life and horticultural activities of Prosper Julius A. Berckmans, the reader is referred to The Plums of New York, page 159.
PEACH-PRODUCTS
The magnitude of the peach-industry in the United States is better appreciated if figures showing values are given. The value of peaches and nectarines in 1909, for the United States, was $28,781,078, an amount surpassed by only one other fruit, the apple. The highest value for a geographical division is reported for the East North-Central States, the amount being $5,173,000, followed by the South Atlantic States with $4,888,000 and the Pacific States with $4,887,000. Of individual states, California with her enormous area, over most of which the peach thrives, ranks first, the value of the crop in 1909 reaching $4,574,000; the next most important State is Georgia, $2,183,000; the third, New York, $2,014,000; these followed in order of value by Michigan, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Kentucky, Alabama, Tennessee and North Carolina, each with a crop of more than $1,000,000 in value.
The peach has greater commercial value in the United States than all other stone-fruits combined, the value of the crop in 1909, as we have seen, amounting to $28,781,078 while the value of the plum was $10,299,495; of the cherry, $7,231,160; of the apricot, $2,884,119; of the almond, $712,000. The consumption of peaches is increasing year by year. Until recently the peach has been considered a fruit of luxury, but large plantations, good care, quick and safe transportation and wide distribution now provide peaches for all who can afford to eat fruit.
The profits of peach-growing are occasionally so enormous that the publication of the figures is usually followed by excessive planting, with consequent over-production and low prices, followed, in turn, by scarcity and high prices. So, too, the peach is more at the mercy of the seasons than any other standard tree-fruit and winter freezes and spring frosts ruin crops in some part of the country every year and often such disasters are widespread. These ups and downs, however, instead of decreasing, seem to stimulate the peach-trade, probably, on the part of the grower, because gambling is a universal vice; on the part of the consumer, because he better appreciates peaches when the blessing is occasionally withdrawn.
The chosen use for any choice fruit is to eat it as it comes from the tree or as prepared fresh fruit for dessert. So the peach is chiefly used the world over. Refreshing and delectable as any other fruit, it has another quality, appreciated by those who sell as well as by those who consume--it does not cloy the appetite. The insatiable longing of the great lexicographer, Johnson, for peaches is common to all lovers of this fruit. Boswell, Johnson's biographer, gives this gustatory reminiscence of his famous patron: "He would eat seven or eight large peaches of a morning before breakfast began, and treated them with proportionate attention after dinner again, yet I have heard him protest that he never had quite as much as he wished, except once, in his life." In America the greater part of the crop is, no doubt, eaten out of hand but peach-pie and peaches and cream, and peach-butter are national dishes, while marmalades, jellies, pickles, preserves and sauces are as common to this fruit as to any other. Besides the innumerable cooked products, several refreshing domestic drinks are made from the juice of peaches, as shrub and peach-wine, or it may be frozen into sherbet or ice cream. Waste peaches are used with more or less success as stock for vinegar. Peaches are canned and evaporated in the United States on an enormous scale, nearly one-half the crop being so utilized.
Canned peaches.--Canning is conservation in excelsis. It is modern compliance to the command, "Gather up the fragments that remain, that nothing be lost." Without this method of preserving crops the commercial culture of fruits and vegetables as carried on nowadays would be ruined and no fruit would suffer as would the peach, since it leads all others in quantity and value of the canned pack. The value of canned peaches in the United States in 1909 was $3,753,698 or nearly one-seventh the total value of the crop and one may roughly estimate the fruit canned at home to be half as much as that canned in the factories. The product was put up in states, named in order of value of the pack as follows: California, $3,013,203; Michigan, $175,386; Maryland, $158,839; Georgia, $156,282; New York, $141,142. These canned peaches go to every part of the world to which they can be cheaply carried and are fit for consumption any time within two or three years after being put up. The canning factory has revolutionized the peach-industry in the United States by giving its products access to the world-market.
Commercial canning is a specialist's business into which we cannot go. The processes, essentially, are the same as those used in domestic canning and consist in destroying all bacteria by heat and then hermetically sealing the product in cans. In canning factories the work is nearly all done by machinery, including peeling, pitting and cutting the fruit, soldering the cans and putting on labels. To purchase proper machinery, hire labor and manage both to secure uniformity and cheapness in the product requires large capital and keen business ability. Peaches are easy to handle in factories and the work can be done so cheaply and the product is so acceptable that the factory-canned fruit is rapidly taking the place of that which a quarter of a century ago was almost wholly put up in the kitchen. The canning industry originated, has been perfected and is now chiefly carried on in the United States and Canada, though rapidly being introduced elsewhere. The aid afforded the peach-grower in this country by the canneries has been a great stimulus and makes the possibilities of profitable production of this fruit in the future certain.
Orchard-canning on a small scale seldom proves feasible, succeeding best, if at all, in a home industry to provide a special product for a fancy or private trade. Occasionally, associations can command capital enough to compete with the large business enterprises but as a rule the peach-grower's interests are served best by the production of acceptable fruit for those who are engaged in the canning industry.
In the East, New York for example, all surplus peaches of standard varieties go to the cannery, though certain sorts have preference, but on the Pacific Coast where peaches are grown for canning, the trade demands a special type. The choice of varieties differs in different localities so that a prescription of sorts to grow for the canning trade cannot be made. Canners accept only yellow-fleshed peaches and usually prefer clingstones since these stand up better in the can. This preference is well shown in figures from California, where in 1913 only 583,800 cases, 24 cans to the case, of freestones were canned as against 1,630,255 cases of clingstones. Fashion now demands varieties red at the pit. Most cans in the great pack coming from California are labeled "Lemon Cling," but this is really now but a trade name, the old Lemon Cling, the pioneer sort in the canning trade, being little grown, a dozen or more similar but improved peaches having taken its place. The nectarine is canned in California but is not yet popular with consumers despite the fact that the product is most appetizing and very pleasing in appearance. Its smooth skin makes it one of the easiest of all fruits to can.
Evaporated peaches.--In regions distant from the markets evaporation is an even richer resource of the peach-grower than canning. Thus, in California in 1909, the value of the peaches canned was $3,013,203 while the dried product was valued at $2,333,137. The figures are greater for canned peaches, but be it remembered that the canners' profits and the cost of the cans must be deducted, whereas evaporated peaches are almost wholly a home product, the grower receiving all of the proceeds. The dried product is pure peach, almost devoid of water. Peaches may be cured as dry as a bone and as hard as wood so that the product will keep indefinitely in the temperate zone, and in this super-dried state is shipped to the tropics. The apple is evaporated in large quantities but is a by-product while the cured peach is usually a primary product--a difference worth noting, for, with the apple, the cream of the crop goes to the fresh fruit-market while the cured peach is of the same grade as the dessert and canned fruit.
The dried-peach industry thrives only in regions, as California, where the summers are sunny and rainless. The product is shipped so cheaply that peach-growers in cloudy and humid climates, as in New York, cannot use artificial heat in evaporators and compete with the cured peaches from the Pacific Slope. In times past when communities were more dependent on local resources, the farmer living almost wholly off of his farm, peaches were cured in humid America though the product, in appearance at least, was much inferior to that from regions having favorable conditions for the evaporation of fruit. New York can hardly hope to compete with California in curing peaches but two factors make it barely possible that this State might make a minor industry out of curing peaches. The factors are the enormous production of peaches in the State, over-production being frequent, and the existence of a great number of apple-evaporators which might be utilized in curing the earlier ripening peaches. It seems worth while, therefore, to go rather fully into the details of curing peaches as practiced in California with the hope that their methods may be modified for use in New York evaporators. The subjoined footnote gives the best account we are able to find of the dried-fruit industry in California and of curing peaches in particular.[209]
The most obvious change which takes place in curing peaches is the loss of water but several other important changes occur which even more materially alter the flavor of the product. According to C. F. Langworthy[210], Chief of the Office of Home Economics, United States Department of Agriculture, the carbohydrates which make up the largest part of the solid matter of fruits undergo greatest changes. The crude fibre, too, is reduced in amount or softened. Much of the starch is changed into some form of sugar and the less soluble sugar may be reduced to a more soluble form. Some of the volatile oils and other ethereal bodies, so important in giving flavor to fruits, pass off or are modified by the curing processes. These changes insure longer keeping in the product, give it greater food value than fresh fruit, pound for pound, leaving it quite as digestible, but not as refreshing and palatable.
Peach-leather was a common dried peach-product in the old domestic epoch before the coming of railroads, steamboats and the establishment of canning and drying industries. Though not now common, peach-leather is still made in many communities in the East, more particularly in the southeastern states. The peaches are peeled, pitted and then mashed into a thin layer which is dried in the sun or an oven, the resulting product taking on the appearance of leather. Peach-leather is said to keep indefinitely, this being its chief merit.
Peach-brandy is still a commercial product of considerable importance though the amount made nowadays, as compared with that made a hundred years ago before prohibition began to be preached, is but a drop in the bucket when the number of bushels raised is considered. According to the Commissioner of Internal Revenue,[211] the quantity of peach-brandy made in 1908, the last year reported, was 13,649.5 gallons, most of which came from California. Peach-brandy is made by converting the sugar of the fruit into alcohol and then distilling. The finished liquor contains about 50 per ct. alcohol. In European countries, peach-kernels are much used in flavoring a liquor called Eau de Noyau.
According to Bulletin 133, Bureau of Plant Industry, United States Department of Agriculture, valuable fixed and volatile oils can be produced from the kernel of the peach. Peach-stones are now burned as fuel by most canneries, excepting small quantities sold to nurseries for propagation. The possibility of producing oils from the kernels seems well worth looking into, since there is now an enormous waste of this part of the fruit by canneries. Oils extracted from peach-kernels may be used for the same commercial purposes as the almond oils; namely, in medicine, for soaps, cosmetics, perfumes and confections. The processes of extraction and distillation are not complex and establishments equipped with steam would have little difficulty in extracting these oils. It is said, too, that the press-cake from which the oils have been extracted makes valuable stock-foods or fertilizers owing to its high content of nitrogenous matter. It is estimated that in California alone the quantity of peach-pits obtained as a by-products of canneries amounts to 10,000 tons in a normal year; that these would yield from 600 to 1,200 tons of kernels from which 210 to 420 tons of oil could be extracted. The wholesale price of bitter-almond oil, or oils purchased under this name, for which peach-oil could be substituted, is from $3.25 to $4.75 per pound.
Pliny named several medicinal uses for the peach and from his time down the flesh, kernels, leaves, bark and blossoms have had a place in the pharmacopoeia of various countries though nowadays little used except in domestic therapeutics. All of the structures named abound in a bitter and astringent principle and most of them produce hydrocyanic acid upon maceration with water. The peach might have value in medicine for this acid were not the chemical more easily obtained elsewhere. The oils from the kernels, as we have seen, may be used in medicine. Noting the medicinal uses to which peach-products have been put by various peoples in various times we find: The leaves are pounded and boiled in vinegar for a liniment, an eye-wash, a cure for "scurf," a preventive of bald heads, and as an insecticide on the heads of children. The blossoms, treated in various ways, have been used for the same ailments and also as a febrifuge. The burned pits are also used in making lampblack for paints.
For more than two thousand years stories have been rife of the poisonous properties of peach-pits and peach-leaves. In a careful perusal of peach-literature for this period and in several languages we have not found a single case cited of fatal results to man or beast from eating the leaves or kernels of peaches. No doubt these stories arise from common knowledge that parts of the peach, as the kernels and possibly the leaves, contain prussic acid though in so minute quantities as never to be toxic in any quantity likely to be eaten by humans or animals. No doubt, too, the myth that the Persians sent the peach to the Egyptians as a deadly poison is still perpetuated.
The wood of the peach is fine-grained and takes a beautiful polish and in Europe is used somewhat in cabinet-work and toy-making. Its numerous reddish-brown veins make it a most beautiful wood but the trees seldom attain sufficient size to give the species value as a lumber-product.
The peach is attractive to the eye at all seasons. A tree or an orchard in bloom is a strikingly beautiful sight while a panorama in a peach-country in flowering-time is one of the most beautiful scenes in nature. There is a great difference in the floral beauty of varieties, some sorts having very inconspicuous flowers while others rank with our finest ornamentals when in bloom. Several types of Prunus persica are planted for beauty of flower and foliage but the fruit-producing peaches are almost never planted for landscape effect though their peculiarly sunny expression in leaf and flower, one of the best types of cheerfulness among trees, should make them useful either standing alone or in mass for ornamental planting. Those who have seen the wild wayside peaches of Kentucky or Tennessee in bloom will always think of the species as an ornamental as well as a fruit-tree.
PEACH-YELLOWS
Yellows is a disease or malignant condition, it is not known which, virulent and contagious whatever it may be, and is the possession primarily of the region north of the Ohio and Potomac and east of the Mississippi. At one time or another it has been a cause of decline of the peach-orchards in every part of the region outlined. Epidemics of yellows have wholly obliterated thriving peach-industries which in some cases covered counties. The changes wrought by yellows come so quickly and are so final, so complete and so widespread in their consequences that the disease stands alone among the troubles of plants in the extent of its influence on the crop affected. Under somewhat better control now, its havoc is less than formerly, but in the past it has outdone all other accidents combined that have happened to peaches in America, including frosts, floods, drought, insects, fungi and injuries due to man and quadrupeds. The mystery of yellows in most of its aspects makes its known history all the more significant. We lack knowledge of what it is, or whence it came, nor do we know of any cure; we know only some of the circumstances and the terrible consequences to the peach. Yellows began its siege of the peach in the very beginning of commercial peach-growing in America. Much of the history of the peach is written in the hundred-years-warfare that has ensued.
Judge Richard Peters of Philadelphia first described and gave name to peach-yellows. February 11, 1806, he read a paper "On Peach Trees" before the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. In this paper we have the first clear account of yellows:[212]
"About fifty years ago, on the farm on which I now reside, my father had a large peach orchard, which yielded abundantly. Until a general catastrophe befell it plentiful crops had been for many years produced with very little attention. The trees began nearly at once to sicken, and finally perished. Whether by the wasp then undiscovered, or by some change in our climate, I know not. For forty years past I have observed the peach trees in my neighborhood to be short-lived. Farther south, in the western country, and, it seems, in some parts of New Jersey they are durable and productive as they had been formerly here. * * * The worm or grub, produced by the wasp depositing its progeny in the soft bark near the surface of the ground, is the most common destroyer. * * * When trees become sickly I grub them up. I find that sickly trees often infect those in vigor near them by some morbid effluvia. Although I have had trees twenty years old, and knew some of double that age (owing probably to the induration of the bark rendering it impervious to the wasp, and the strength acquired when they had survived early misfortunes), yet in general they do not live in tolerable health after bearing four or five crops. * * * Fifteen or sixteen years ago I lost one hundred and fifty peach trees in full bearing in the course of two summers by a disease engendered in the first season. I attribute its origin to some morbid infection in the air. * * * The disorder being generally prevalent would, among animals, have been called an epidemic. From perfect verdure the leaves turned yellow in a few days, and the bodies blackened in spots. Those distant from the point of infection gradually caught the disease. I procured young trees from a distance in high health and planted them among the least diseased. In a few weeks they became sickly, and never recovered. * * * After my general defeat and most complete overthrow, in which the worm had no agency, I recruited my peaches from distant nurseries, not venturing to take any out of those in my vicinity. I have since experienced a few instances of this malady, and have promptly, on the first symptoms appearing, removed the subjects of it, deeming their cases desperate in themselves and tending to the otherwise inevitable destruction of others."
In the last few lines of this account, Judge Peters gives the only means so far discovered to check the spread of the disease--the prompt destruction of affected trees--a striking commentary on the baffling nature of yellows when we consider what science has done, since Judge Peters wrote, toward the control of other plant-diseases. In a note of later date, page 23 of the same article, Judge Peters speaks of "the disease I call the yellows," thus giving name to a trouble that until then had been known as "decay" or "degeneracy" in the peach.
Later Judge Peters writes:[213] "I am pursuing my old plan of re-instating my peach trees lost last season (1806 or 1807) by my unconquerable foe, the disease I call the yellows. I obtain them from different nurseries free from this pestiferous affection. The worm or wasp (Ægeria) I have in complete subjection. I should be perfectly disinterested in proposing that the society offer a premium for preventing the disease so fatal; for I shall never gain the reward."
And again:[214] "I still think that the disease so generally fatal (more so this year than any other in my memory), called the yellows, is atmospherical. * * * Compare this account (of thrifty orchards in Delaware) with the actual state of the peach in our country, and judge whether we live in a region favorable to its growth. Mr. Heston's attempt at cultivating this tree in the Southern manner begins already to fail. His trees are evidently infected, and many are on the decline. The yellows are universally prevalent this season throughout the whole country (i. e., around Philadelphia)."
We have given but little out of much that Judge Peters wrote on yellows, his observations and experiences covering nearly a generation. We have quoted sufficiently from his accounts, however, indubitably to establish the fact that peach-yellows was rampant about Philadelphia at least as early as 1800. Smith[215] puts the appearance of yellows in this region as probably some time prior to 1791. By this time there was a considerable body of scientific and practical agricultural literature in America, and we may assume, since no trouble that could possibly be identified as yellows had been described as existing elsewhere in America, though the peach-borer is frequently discussed, that the disease at this period, about 1800, was restricted to the neighborhood of Philadelphia.
We now find the yellows gradually extending into neighboring states--Delaware, New Jersey, Maryland and New York. Wm. Coxe of New Jersey who in 1807 wrote Judge Peters, "I am perfectly ignorant of the disease to which you give the name yellows," in 1817 knew it only too well as "a malady which no remedy can cure nor cultivation avert," and devotes nearly two pages in his Fruit Trees to a discussion of its nature.[216] References to yellows in all of the states named by this time had become general. Our purpose to show the spread, effects, and early treatment of the disease is fully served by quoting at length from a single author--a keen observer, careful writer and the most notable horticultural and botanical authority of his time, Wm. Prince, of Flushing, Long Island.[217] To Prince, by the way, we are indebted for the first reference to what is now considered the most certain symptom of yellows--premature ripening of fruit. Prince says:
"This disease, which commenced its ravages in New Jersey and Pennsylvania about the year 1797, and in New York in 1801, and has spread through several of the states, is by far more destructive to peach trees than the worm, and is evidently contagious. This disease is spread at the time when the trees are in bloom, and is disseminated by the pollen or farina blowing from the flowers of diseased trees, and impregnating the flowers of those which are healthy, and which is quickly circulated by the sap through the branches, foliage, and fruit, causing the fruit, wherever the infection extends, to ripen prematurely. That this disease is entirely distinct from the worm, is sufficiently proved by the circumstance, that peach trees which have been inoculated on plum or almond stocks, though less affected by the worm, are equally subject to the yellows--and a decisive proof of its being contagious is, that a healthy tree, inoculated from a branch of a diseased one, instead of restoring the graft to vigour and health, immediately becomes itself infected with the disease. As all efforts totally to subdue it must require a long course of time, the best method to pursue towards its eventual eradication, is to stop its progress, and prevent its farther extension--to accomplish which, the following means are recommended, which have been found particularly successful.
As soon as a tree is discovered to possess the characteristics of the disease, which is generally known by the leaves putting on a sickly yellow appearance--but of which the premature ripening of the fruit is a decisive proof--it should be marked, so as to be removed the ensuing autumn, which must be done without fail, for if left again to bloom, it would impart the disease to many others in its vicinity; care is also necessary, in its removal, to take out all the roots of the diseased tree, especially if another is to be planted in the same place, so that the roots of the tree to be planted may not come in contact with any of those of the one which was diseased.
If your neighbour has trees infected with the yellows in a quarter contiguous to yours, it will be necessary to prevail on him to remove them, that yours may not be injured by them. By being thus particular in speedily removing such trees as may be infected, the disease is prevented from extending itself to the rest of the orchard, and the residue will consequently be preserved in perfect health at the trifling loss of a few trees annually from a large orchard."
The influence of yellows on the peach-industry of the country is shown by indicating when it appeared in the various states in which peaches are grown in eastern America and by noting the effects of epidemics of the disease.
In Pennsylvania, following the first outbreak, peach-growing all but disappeared, to reappear again from time to time in new regions or in old ones following an interval of years after a plague had passed. Periods and places of epidemics are indicated by such quotation as follow: Wm. G. Warren, Centre County, reports in 1851: "A majority of the peach trees have been destroyed by the yellows."[218] In the proceedings of the American Pomological Society for 1852, a Pennsylvanian reports for the State: "Peaches have done but ill with us for some years past. The yellows have swept off thousands of trees."[219] In 1880 in a book on the peach, Rutter devotes many pages to yellows in Pennsylvania and speaks of "thousands of trees dead and dying from the disease in Chester and Delaware counties."[220] The epidemic in the eighties seems to have been particularly severe, there being at the end of the decade but 1,146,342 bearing trees in the State which by 1900 had increased to 3,521,930 trees.
Perhaps of all states, in proportion to area planted, New Jersey has suffered most from yellows. Beginning with the epidemic mentioned by Coxe in 1817, there have been several disastrous irruptions of the disease in that State. A particularly destructive epidemic must have raged in the early forties, for in 1846 W. R. Prince, Flushing, Long Island, says:[221] "Any one who visits the once splendid peach orchards in various parts of New Jersey will be struck by the desolate aspect of innumerable plantations of dead trees, with only here and there a sprig of verdure amid the mighty mass." Another writer, Colonel Edward Wilkins, says: "Fifty thousand acres in peach trees, in two counties only, had been destroyed by the yellows prior to 1850;" and in 1858, he further states that "at that time nearly the whole of the peach orchards of New Jersey had been destroyed by yellows."[222] He concludes, in the same article, that "in New Jersey the peach belongs to the past." We choose as the last of the many accounts of disaster from yellows in this State two quotations from Professor P. D. Penhallow written in 1882:[223]
"In New Jersey, where the ravages of the disease have been more seriously felt than elsewhere, the southern counties were formerly the center of the peach industry for the entire State, but, owing to the prevalence of the yellows the peach orchards have been gradually moving northward, until at the present time the counties of Morris and Hunterdon have the largest interest involved, and the prospect is that a few more years will see even these localities deprived of the industry."
"The peach growers of New Jersey consider an orchard worth nothing after the age of nine years. At that time they root out all the trees as they would so many corn stumps, and use the land for general crops, planting a young orchard of seedlings each year to make good the loss."
Still passing northward from the first center of infection, we come to New York, where, according to Wm. Prince, in a foregoing quotation, the disease appeared as early as 1801. The son of this writer, W. R. Prince, in the continuation of the article quoted on page 121, written in 1846, says: "In this island the malady became exhausted some years since by the utter destruction of the old orchards, and the determination not to plant new ones until it became extinct. This proved most fortunate as the disease has been for years banished from Long Island, and now new orchards are springing up everywhere, and every garden is becoming readorned with the finest varieties of the Peach 'redolent with health.'" A. J. Downing,[224] writing in 1849, reports: "Fifteen years ago there was scarcely a tree in the vicinity of Newburgh that was not more or less diseased with the yellows. By pursuing the course we have indicated (destruction by burning), the disease has almost disappeared." Thirty years later, Charles Downing, writing from Newburgh, states: "We have had the yellows here at intervals for over sixty years, some times continuing for five or six years and then several years free from it."
At present, 1916, peaches are freely planted along the Hudson in the region of which the Downings wrote, and, whether from following the method of A. J. Downing in burning the trees, or whether we are in one of the intervals of immunity noted by Charles Downing, peach-yellows, while present, causes but small losses. One might enlarge at length on the vagaries of yellows but we can concern ourselves only with the main facts of its history. We now follow the disease from eastern to western New York.
Looking through the records of the hundred years of peach-growing in western New York, we find little to indicate that yellows has ever been the scourge in this region that it is pictured to have been eastward and southward or even westward in Michigan. The explanation? Growers, as a rule, promptly cut out diseased trees. Here there has been less dilly-dallying and fewer hocus-pocus remedies in treating yellows. Western New York, more than other regions, has been favored in the century past by its many eminent horticulturists, several fruit-growers' societies and by farmers' publications. The result is that there is an enlightened and energetic body of peach-growers, who, instead of catching and catching at every will-o-the-wisp notion about yellows, have prevented its spread by proper orchard-sanitation. Yet the yellows is here and has been since 1824 at least. In that year David Thomas, father of J. J. Thomas, the pomological writer, planted peaches from Flushing, Long Island, on the shore of Cayuga Lake, which developed yellows with the resulting loss of every tree.[225] But in 1844 John J. Thomas records: "In Western New York it is comparatively unknown, and great care should be used by cultivators that it be not introduced by importations."[226] In New York the depreciation of real estate caused by yellows has not been nearly so marked as in other peach-regions because of the greater diversification of fruit-growing than in other eastern states.
This region not only has not had yellows continuously but has never had the sudden and violent invasions of the disease that have laid waste the orchards in other communities of intensive culture of this fruit. The one exception, possibly, was in the decade running from 1875 to 1885. A. M. Smith,[227] writing in 1878, says that hundreds of bushels of high-colored, insipid, premature peaches were sold in western New York in 1877, that one orchard in Niagara County was destroyed by the disease and that others in the vicinity were badly affected. Charles W. Garfield, a prominent Michigan horticulturist, reported in 1880 that J. S. Woodward of Lockport, New York, had a young orchard of peaches, covering thirty acres, so badly diseased that the trees would have to be taken out before having produced a crop. Later, 1887,[228] Mr. Woodward, speaking for his neighborhood, says that yellows has "nearly finished the orchards."[229] To conclude as to the conditions of orchards at the close of this epidemic, we have from Col. F. D. Curtis[230] the report, in 1887, that yellows had destroyed whole orchards in the western counties of New York especially in Niagara and Ontario. At this writing, 1916, yellows may almost be said to be a minor difficulty in peach-growing in western New York.
Peach-culture has been comparatively unimportant in Connecticut and Massachusetts until recent years but the toll taken by yellows has been proportionately as high as elsewhere in the hundred years of its trespassing. The history of its ravages is told in such statements as follows: "Yellows appeared in the vicinity of New Haven in 1820 and destroyed thousands of trees nearly putting an end to peach growing."[231] "The yellows are destroying our peach trees."[232] "Peaches are infected with yellows and are generally things of the past."[233] "Cultivation of the peach is now abandoned in consequence of that scourge to that fruit known as yellows."[234] The foregoing accounts apply to Connecticut but reports are much the same for Massachusetts, the following being typical: A writer in 1882 declares that yellows about Boston was unknown in 1837 but that "when it came it swept everything."[235] "Thirty or forty years ago (1842-1852) peaches were grown in great abundance in this vicinity (northeast Massachusetts) but for the last twenty years have been almost abandoned."[236] "In former years (said in 1854) peach trees have rarely suffered from yellows in this neighborhood (Cambridge) where now many trees are affected by it."[237]
Sweeping westward from New York, yellows appeared in Ohio about the middle of the Nineteenth Century, for, in 1851, an orchard of 600 trees at Saint Clairsville was said to have been destroyed by it.[238] In the same year the report came from Richard County: "Our peach trees are somewhat affected by yellows."[239] In the years that follow, down to the present time, the presence of yellows, its symptoms, affects and treatment are discussed in the voluminous records of agriculture in Ohio as a commonplace part in the culture of the peach though the disease seems not to have been quite so virulent nor so often epidemic in Ohio as in other prominent peach-growing states.
Nowhere has the haste and waste of yellows been more apparent than in the peach-belt of western Michigan. The history of the disease is well established in this region, the main facts being: The disease appeared about Saint Joseph and Benton Harbor, Berrien County, in the late sixties of the last century. At first spreading slowly, its movement became more rapid "until by 1877-78 it was destructively prevalent in nearly every orchard in the county."[240] "The peach industry was literally swept out of Berrien County in one decade. There can be no doubt of this. From being the foremost peach county in Michigan, with an acreage more than equal to that of all other counties combined (6000 acres in 1874), it became ninth in order, and could boast of only 503 acres."[241] In 1877, T. T. Lyon declares:[242] "This violent and contagious disease has nearly destroyed the peach orchards at Saint Joseph." Three years later in the annual report of the State Pomological Society, Charles W. Garfield, secretary, says "there are scarcely any peach orchards left at Saint Joseph."[243] The depreciation of peach-lands at this time, due to yellows, was so great as to threaten the community with bankruptcy.
Pitiful was the case of the growers in Berrien County; pitiful enough that of those in Van Buren County, next on the north, but not so bad owing to the timely and strict enforcement of a "yellows law" early passed by the State legislature. The disease seems to have become established in Van Buren County about 1870 but did not become rampant until four or five years later "when about five per cent of the trees were found diseased and were taken out."[244] Then came such reports as these: "At least 5,000 trees have been destroyed by this disease the past season in this county alone."[245] "That dreaded ravage of the peach-grower, yellows, has made slow but marked progress during the years in this locality."[246] "If the yellows continues to spread, it will be only a question of years when peach-growing will cease on the lake shore."[247] These three reports, out of many such, give the condition of the peach-orchards in western Van Buren. In the eastern part of the county, especially about Lawton where the peach is largely grown, the disease was later in appearing, cutting out was more strictly attended to, and the damage, therefore, was markedly less.
Allegan County, north of Van Buren, along the lake shore at least, suffered from yellows rather less, though nearly as badly as the region to the south. The disease was less and less virulent as the peach-belt extends northward. At Traverse City, the most northern point in the peach-belt, yellows has never been epidemic. Passing eastward, the disease appeared about Grand Rapids, the center of peach-culture in Kent County, in 1883 and in the decade that followed took from peach-growers the toll usual in western Michigan. Eastward from Kent County, however, in the several small and rather isolated cases of peach-growing yellows either has not appeared or has been an unimportant factor.
The lowest ebb in Michigan orchards from yellows was reached in the eighties after which new plantings increased remarkably, the number of bearing trees in 1889 being but 1,919,104 and in 1899, 8,104,415. The disease still persists in Michigan wherever in former times it became established. Yellows seems, however, to have lost much of its old time virulency; or, perhaps, the fact that peach-growers are more prompt and thorough in destroying diseased trees accounts for the decrease of the disease. Then, too, the Michigan peach-belt has had the bitter experience in the last decade or two, of several winter freezes which have wiped out whole orchards, discouraged many planters, and, together with the keen competition of new peach-regions, reduced the size of orchards and scattered the plantations so that, in the lessened communal intensity, yellows has less opportunity.
Going back, now, to the place of first infection and passing southward, we find that yellows, though not more virulent in Delaware than in Michigan, was much more devastating. Destruction is the only efficient method in treating yellows. The necessity of this drastic measure has been proclaimed by every authority from Judge Peters, discover of yellows, down. The strong arm of the law in many states enforces destruction. In Delaware, however, growers were more dilatory in destroying yellows-trees than elsewhere--in fact for the first half-century made little attempt so to check the disease. When the scales fell from the eyes of orchard-owners in this State the industry was already ruined. From hundreds of accounts, the ups and downs of peach-growing in Delaware as caused by yellows may be shown by a few brief statements.
The peach-industry began in Delaware about 1830 and there are few references to peach-yellows until a decade or two after that time, though Dr. John J. Black says that the disease had been known in the State "since the war of 1812."[248] The yellows-sweep really began in the northern part of Delaware in New Castle County, in the early forties, when, according to John Delano, Isaac Reeves' peach-trees were dying of yellows by the score "maugre all his care, cultivation and circumspection."[249] In 1846, James W. Thompson, in a splendid account of the peach-industry in Delaware, names the borer and yellows as the two devastating enemies of this fruit and speaks of the latter as a "constitutional, consumptive or marasmatic disease for which no other remedy is known or to be practiced, but extirpation and destruction."[250] "By 1855 the yellows had taken possession of nearly all the orchards, and peach culture in this section was at an end."[251] Yet in the same county, about Middletown, but a few miles to the south, the disease though present was not epidemic nor did it become so until twenty years later.
With the passing of the orchards in northern New Castle, the southern part of the county became the center of the industry in Delaware. Here, in the early seventies, there were from 1,000,000 to 1,750,000 trees covering from 10,000 to 17,500 acres.[252] Yellows, according to numerous accounts, became virulent about 1870, was at its height in 1875, after which the progress and outcome of the epidemic is essentially the same as in the northern part of the county--the yellows-sweep was driving slowly but surely southward. Thus, in 1880, the center of the industry was in Kent County, second south of the three counties in Delaware, there being in 1879, according to the census of 1880, nearly 2,000,000 trees covering nearly 20,000 acres in this county. Yellows, present and widespread at an early date in Kent, was not alarmingly destructive until the summers of 1886 and 1887, when in the northern two-thirds of the county the disease "spread like wild fire." At this time and as late as 1890, there was little yellows in southern Kent and northern Sussex, but before the end of the century the whole State had been swept by yellows. There are no census figures for peaches until 1890 when the number of bearing trees in Delaware was 4,521,623. The toll taken by yellows, augmented by San Jose scale, is indicated by the falling off in number of trees in the next decade, at the end of which there were 2,441,650 trees and after another decade, 1909, but 1,177,402 trees.
Beginning late in the last century, however, there was a revival in peach-planting in Delaware, especially the northern part of the State, and now a new peach-industry seems well started in which, through energetic orchard-sanitation and diversified horticulture, yellows, for the present at least, is held at bay. The palmy days of fabulous prices for peaches and peach-lands, however, are past in Delaware. Here, as in other communities ravaged by yellows, the value of lands has sunk to a half or a quarter of what it would have brought a generation ago in the height of peach-culture. In some cases property, formerly valuable, has lost all value--a peach-farm will not sell at any price. The best peach-lands are seldom fit for other crops, so that in Delaware, New Jersey and Michigan the whole community, including railroads and steamboat lines, suffers to the verge of bankruptcy when yellows exterminates the orchards.
Probably in no other State in the Union is the peach more perfectly at home than in Maryland, it having held undisputed supremacy among fruits in that State for over a century and a half. Yellows, though always menacing, has not been so devastating as in Delaware to the north. Erwin F. Smith thinks that yellows has been present in the northern counties of eastern Maryland for many years--since 1844 or 1845. In his detailed account of the disease in this State[253] he records but one destructive outbreak of yellows, this occurring in the summers of 1886, 1887 and 1888 in the northeastern part of the State where in two counties along the whole length of the Sassafras River it was destructively present. Smith notes that yellows, at this time, "is moving southward on the peninsula." Since Smith's account, 1888, reports from Maryland show that, while the disease is still present and is now in practically all parts of the State, either it is not now so virulent or is kept in check by extirpating diseased trees. Still, however, the great decrease in the number of peach-trees in Maryland in the last twenty years is largely due to yellows, there being 6,113,287 bearing trees in 1889, but 4,017,854 in 1899, and only 1,497,724 in 1909.
In the South, west of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific Coast, yellows does not exist or if so is not epidemic.
Would that it could be recorded, as we conclude this brief account of yellows and its plague-spots in America, that in the hundred years of conflict some headway had been made in ascertaining from whence the disease came, what its cause and what the cure. Would, too, that we could believe that the final holocaust has passed. But we cannot bandage our eyes against the facts. We are as profoundly ignorant of yellows as at the start. And, while New York at the moment is nearly free from yellows, everywhere the sinister reminders of ancient epidemics, like skeletons at a feast that are never out of sight, bid us be on our guard for new outbreaks.
PEACH-BREEDING
But little effort has been made, as the histories of its varieties show, to breed peaches. All but a very few varieties have come from chance seedlings. Peaches were grown from seed for centuries and many types now come true when seeds are planted. After budded trees became the vogue, until Mendel's great discovery, breeding the peach consisted in selecting an occasional meritorious tree, multiplying it by budding and, if it had pronounced merit, turning it over to a nurseryman for the trade. The art progressed no further because selection was thought to be the fundamental process in improving plants and breeders preferred to work in fields where the harvests were more immediate than in tree-fruits. Now that plant-breeding centers around controlled hybridization, plants propagated vegetatively should receive quite as much attention as those grown from seed. Mendel has opened the door to intimate familiarity with some of the fundamental phenomena of hybridization, and, despite the difficult and complex literature the professionals are imposing on the art, chiefly discussions of methods and disputations about principles, the layman finds Mendelian laws easy to put in practice; and peach-breeding is certain to go forward in leaps and bounds as the irresistible fascination of the subject seizes peach-growers.
Meanwhile, as a foundation for future work, it becomes highly important to know how the varieties we have came into existence. The known histories of the many diverse kinds of peaches show that this fruit has been improved almost wholly through new varieties by chance hybridization--self-fertilized seed, selection and mutations are almost negligible factors. The following are the data: No case is recorded in The Peaches of New York of a variety known to have come from a self-fertilized seed. The seed parent is given for 214 varieties; the seed and pollen parents of 37 varieties. But 4 varieties are reported to have come from bud-mutations. Of chance seedlings, sorts from seed with neither parent known, there are 161. The origins of 1765 of the varieties described in The Peaches of New York are unknown. The total number of peaches described is 2181.