Miscellaneous. 373 



Old Solomon Gallup, forgotten is he, 



And the cabin, few know where it stood ; 

 But the robins still sing in the top of that tree, 

 The lovers still whisper beneath it, and free 

 The laugh of the children still rings— and to me 

 It seems that his labor was good. 

 And bird song and laughter and lover's low tone 

 Are epitaphs better than those on a stone. 



— Joe Lincoln. 



— National Fruit Gron'cr. 



STERILITY IN THE JAPANESE PLUMS. 



(Prof. M. B. W.iite, U. S. Department of Agriculture ; 



Since my discovery of self-sterility in apples and pears, other in- 

 vestigators have extended this principle to other fruits. Notably, Prof. 

 Beach of the New York Experiment Station at Geneva has shown that 

 many varieties of cultivated grapes are incapable of setting fruit from 

 their own pollen and require cross-pollination with another variety. Goff 

 in Wisconsin, Waugh in Vermont and Massachusetts, and Fletcher in 

 New York state have extended this principle to plums. While in case 

 of the Domestic plums self-sterility does not seem to be so definitely 

 proved as with the Japanese and with the natives, it probably is only a 

 question of experimenting to find that at least a certain amount of self- 

 sterilitv exists. 



As to the self-sterility of Japanese plums, it being asserted by some 

 that the}' are capable of fruiting with their own pollen, I am very well 

 satisfied, both as to the result of the work of the investigators before 

 mentioned and from experiments carried on recently in my own plum 

 orchard, that the Japanese plums are practically self-sterile and require 

 cross-pollination to insure fruitfulness. Not only the ordinary, common 

 Japanese varieties, such as Abundance, Burbank, Red June, Chabot, 

 Agen, etc., are decidedly self-sterile to their own pollen, but the related 

 variety, the Wickson, a hybrid between the Japanese and Prunus Simonii. 



Furthermore, I have three trees of W^ickson planted in a pear orchard 

 nearly half a mile from my plum orchard, and while they have bloomed 

 profusely, they have never set a single fruit, although trees of the same 

 age standing alongside other varieties in the plum orchard on the same 

 farm have fruited heavily. 



The Japanese phmis are not only extremely fertile and fruit very 

 heavily when cross-pollinated with the other varieties of their own group 

 (as for instance Abundance pollen on Burbank, or vice versa), but they 

 are also fertile when pollinated by the natives and probably most other 



