TRAILING ARBUTUS FROM SEED 



A LTHOUGH it is now several years since the secret 

 of cultivating the trailing arbutus was given to the 

 world, it will probably take several years more to thor- 

 oughly disseminate this knowledge and dispose of the old 

 idea that it requires some kind of necromancy to induce 

 this most attractive of our native heaths to bloom or even 

 to live under the ministrations of the gardener. That the 

 plant may now be grown from seed, like any other plant, 

 is shown by the following excellent account of an experi- 

 ment of this kind by Anna D. White which is taken from 

 the Proceedings of the Delaware County Institute of Science. 



The idea of obtaining trailing arbutus plants from seed 

 instead of by the often attempted and usually unsuccessful 

 method of transplanting plants from the woods, was first 

 suggested to me by Mr. Frederic V. Coville of the United 

 States Department of Agriculture. I was much pleased by 

 his beautifully-blooming pots which I saw in April 1913 in 

 the Department greenhouses at Washington. Mr. Coville 

 gave me full cultural directions and my subsequent partial 

 success with arbutus has been the result of his advice. The 

 following notes are a summary of the steps in its culture. 



July 0, 101.°), a small quantity of arbutus seed obtained 

 after much searching from the white fleshy berry of wild 

 plants in New Jersey, was planted in soil composed of two 

 parts peat to one of white sand. About August 13th the 

 first minute seedlings appeared. They were wintered in a 



