16-i State Hoi'ticultural Society. 



Master Philip McDonald recited the selection which follows : 

 PLEASURES OF THE BLACKBERRY. 



Formerly the blackberry was regarded as merely a bramble in this 

 country. It is still quite generally so regarded. When a man gets to 

 thinking it is not a bramble, all he has to do is to go waltz aronnd in a 

 healthy patch, with nothing on him bnt a cotton shirt and a pair of 

 tow trousers, and he will come out restored to the faith of his fathers. 

 The greatest enemy the blackberry has, is boys. Five boys, from town, 

 can eat more green blackberries in a day than would ripen in a Vv'eek. 

 For many years the great desideratum has been a hardy berry that could 

 resist the premature onslaught of boys from to^^m. It is a great desid- 

 eratum still. The Schneider, a variety that was invented bv an Iowa 

 horticulturist, is the nearest approach to it. It is bred from a perfectly 

 gree persimmon, crossed with a dognvood tree and propagated with a 

 hybrid of wormwood bush, and wild crab apple. It is not a perfect 

 defense, but there are very few boys who care to eat more than a 

 quart of them. ISTobody else, however, can go past the field where the 

 Schneider is growing, without being attacked by Asiatic cholera, and 

 this tends to weaken the partial success this hardy berry has achieved. 

 Then there is a bug- — I do not know the name of it — that crawls over the 

 berries now than then. When you eat a berry that has geen glorified by 

 a visit from this bug, you lie down in the briars and pray heaven to 

 take you home in iust about three seconds. And if you live, vou can 

 wake up in the night, along in the middle of next winter, and shudder 

 as you taste the old taste of that berry. 



When your blackberries grow too thickly, you will want to thin 

 them out. To this end you must kill some of them. This can be 

 done by digging a well where the plant stands; then turn the farm 

 upside do-uTi, and let it dry out thoroughly for a couple of years, then 

 turn it over, upside down, and start a brickyard on the back of it. This 

 will kill off some of the plants. There may be some shorter and 

 cheaper method of killing blackberry vines than this, but I never heard 

 of it, and it isn't likely that there is any. 



