THE SMALL FRUITS OF NEW YORK l8l 



might almost be said to be at once the best and most abundant wild fruit. 

 Their abundance is proverbial. Shakespeare says, " If reasons were as 

 plentiful as blackberries." The abundance of the wild crop, no doubt, is 

 the reason that in all the centuries of agriculture preceding the last no one 

 took seriously to the task of breeding and cultivating any of the many wild 

 blackberries and dewberries. The blackberry is about the commonest 

 wild fruit of Europe and the fruit of some species is quite as delectable as 

 that of our American blackberries, but usually the wild plants supply the 

 demand, although now and then it is found under cultivation. The wild 

 blackberry is often a vicious plant, thorny and self assertive, and the wild 

 dewberry is both vicious and unmanageable, characteristics which have 

 kept both fruits out of gardens. 



The domestication of the blackberry began in the United States, 

 though not until two centuries of prejudice had passed on the part of the 

 pioneers from Europe. The blackberry was to the early settlers a briar, 

 a bramble, a pestiferous weed difficult to get rid of and not worth cultivat- 

 ing when the wild fruits could be had in abundance. The early notices of 

 blackberries in the first agricioltural books and papers were chiefly dis- 

 cussions of how this vicious and persistent plant could be easiest killed and 

 permanently kept down, with now and then a recipe for making blackberry 

 wine which seemed to be highly esteemed by the colonists as a medicine 

 and a cordial. No doubt plants were occasionally set in gardens but there 

 were no named varieties, and there was no real blackberry culture for com- 

 mercial purposes until the middle of the nineteenth century when several 

 named sorts were introduced, and interest became keen in cultivating 

 blackberries for home and markets. 



William Kenrick in his New American Orchardist, 1833, seems to be 

 the first writer on pomology in the New World to recommend the culti- 

 vation of the blackberry in a formal fruit book. McMahon, Coxe, and the 

 two Princes, who had published earlier books on fruit growing in America, 

 do not mention it although the other small fruits are discussed and the 

 barberry, now seldom grown in gardens, received considerable attention. 

 Kenrick^ says of the blackberry: " A shrub rising to the height of ten feet, 

 somewhat ribbed or angled and armed with hooked spines. The fruit, 

 which grows in clusters, is oblong, an inch in length, of a shining black, of an 

 agreeable taste, sweet or subacid and astringent. This plant thrives in a 

 rich moist sandy loam, and is often cultivated in gardens,' where its fruit is 



' Kenrick, Willifim Am. Orch. 336 1832. 



