WILD FRUITS WHICH OUGHT TO BE CULTIVATED. 59 



for the improvements to be made when the results may be confidently 

 expected to be acceptable to our palates. In other words, the people are 

 ready to buy and eat the foregoing fruits when they are ameliorated and 

 modified by cultivation. Now I wish to suggest half a dozen or so of our 

 wild fruits that are still wholly in the experimental stage. In fact, I am 

 not at all certain that people will eat some of the following things even 

 though we were to cultivate them in considerable quantities. And yet I 

 think it is worth our while to seek to add these to the list of fruits that 

 we grow in our orchards and plantations. 



Wild Apples (Mains ioensis). 



Here I refer to what are commonly called wild crab apples, and 

 which grow in the eastern and northeastern portions of the state. As I 

 pointed out many years ago in a paper read before this society, our tree 

 is not strictly a crab apple, but it is in reality a wild apple, allied rather 

 closely with the wild apple of the Old. World from which all of our culti- 

 vated varieties of apples have come. And it is a fact that in this native 

 wild apple we have a better primitive stock than our forefathers found 

 when they first took up the wild apple of Europe and Asia. Sometimes 

 when I have urged fruit growers to begin improving our wild apple 1 

 have been met by the remark that the Old World apple is good enough, 

 but this I am sure will not be your attitude, and I hope to live to eat pal- 

 atable apples derived by some of you from our native wild apple. 



Hawthorns (Crataegus sp.). 



Every one who has observed our hawthorns closely has been impressed 

 by the fact that they are very variable as to their fruits, and every one 

 of you who was a boy in a region where hawthorns were abundant will 

 remember that on some trees the fruits were very good tasting. Of 

 course there is not a great deal of flesh on these little fruits, but what 

 there is of it is good. Now since these are hardy trees, what more nat- 

 ural suggestion can I make than that, after carefhl selection, an attempt 

 should be made to ameliorate the taste and increase the size of the fruits 

 of some of our native hawthorns? 



Rose Apples (Rosa sp.). 



Here again I must appeal to your boyhood recollection of the good 

 taste you often found in the flesh of the rose apples that grow on the 

 prairies. Even now as I run across the ripe, red apples on our low wild 

 rose I am always tempted to eat all that I flnd, and my taste still assures 

 me that they are good eating now, and I am sure that they could be 

 greatly improved by cultivation and selection. Let some one start with 

 a carefully selected wild form, and then plant the seeds of the largest 

 and finest apples, doing this for a number of generations. I am confident 

 that in these pretty red fruits we have the promise of what man might 



