TRANSACTIONS OF JACKSONVILLE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 251 



Standing committees are appointed upon the following subjects : 

 Small Fruits, Culinary Vegetables, Vineyards, Orchard Fruits, Preserved 

 Fruits, Horticultural Philosophy and Practice, Fine Arts, Entomology and 

 Ornithology, Botany, Shade Trees, Floriculture, Green-house Plants. 



One of these committees reports each week, and in the order named, 

 beginning June, 1S73. 



Meetings are held in the Court-house, in Jacksonville, the first Satur- 

 day evening in each month. 



The record of the last annual meeting is the only paper sent to the 

 editor for publication, which is as follows : 



JACKSONVILLE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY — JUNE MEETING. 



The annual meeting of this Society was held at the Court-house on 

 the evening of the 7th inst. 



The reports of committees being the first thing in order, Mr. Hart 

 H. Massey, from the Committee on Orchards, entertained the Society 

 with a few interesting facts gleaned from his more than half a century of 

 varied experience in fruit culture in the West. In 1818, he settled in Illi- 

 nois, and for want of something better, he experimented with the persim- 

 mon, and shortly learned that its use, especially in the green state, could 

 not be highly recommended. He afterwards crossed the country to Mis- 

 souri, where, among the wild fruits which attracted his attention, he found 

 a strawberry of uncommonly strong growth, and enormously productive, 

 the flavor of which was far superior to that of any variety we have in cul- 

 tivation to-day. But being naturally attracted by the pomonal names of 

 several streams running through Iowa, he traveled in that direction, and 

 after wandering the entire length of Plum Creek and Apple River without 

 finding even a tree or shrub to remind him of the name of either, he con- 

 cluded that there was nothing significant in the cognomen attached to 

 the perishable things of this world, and returned to Illinois, where he has 

 since lived. He secured his first respectable fruit from seedlings, one of 

 the original trees of which is yet standing on his farm. It is over fifty 

 years of age, and fruits annually, yielding a fair crop of remarkably good 

 looking apples, whicli. without any extra care, may be kept until the 

 August following. 



He received his first grafted fruit from Kllwanger «fe Barry, of Roch- 

 ester, New York. Having no experience of his own or other western men 

 to guide him in his operations, he followed the instructions given by east- 

 em planters, dug holes four feet in diameter, and three feet deep, and 

 cut trees back to within two feet of the ground. In a few years, he found 

 that his low-headed trees were a nuisance, and commenced trimming, and 

 had been at it ever since. He had now learned from his own experience 

 that four and a half to five feet was the proper distance from the ground 

 to start a tree-head. 



