NOTES ON PEARS. 



in reference to the blight. He spent several days in this vicinity and its neighborhood 

 He had taken a wide survey of the counties of central and western New-York, with an in- 

 spection of the principal pear orchards, in the intention, if the results of his observations 

 were ftivorable, of locating himself in our best pear growing district, and commencing an 

 orchaid on a large scale. After he had returned home, I received a letter from him, say- 

 ing, that in the finest fruit regions of western New-York, he had found the blight among 

 the pears more or less fatal, and that hardly a locality of any extent appeared exempt from 

 it; and he was altogether in doubt of the success of his enterprise, if he should engage 

 in it. 



The pear trees in the immediate vicinity of Buffalo have, until the last two years, been al- 

 most quite exempt from the blight; and in the occasional branches which it struck, gave no 

 alarm, from the unfrequency with which it occurred, and the slight extent of its stroke. 

 Within two miles of the center of the city, on a high, undulating, sandy-loam soil, occasional- 

 ly mixed with gravel, and the lower parts of it mixed with clayey-loam, but not highly 

 charged with lime, are several fine fruit gardens. The extensive nurseries of Col. Hodge and 

 the Messrs. Bryant, are there, who have numerous large standard pear trees, which have 

 for years produced a great deal of fruit, of several varieties. Close by them reside, also, 

 Mr. Lewis Eaton and Mr. Charles Taintor, who several years ago planted fine orchards 

 of pear trees, which had just began to be productive. These gentlemen are all good pomo- 

 logists, and good cultivators, and were in high hopes that their trees, having so far escap- 

 ed the blight, would remain free from it. But the last summer has been almost fatal to 

 them. Their orchard trees, on quince and pear stocks alike, were struck in almost every 

 possible situation, and of almost every different variety of this fruit, until they now pre- 

 sent, in their mutilated tops and branches, but a wreck of the luxuriance and beauty which 

 but a year before they exhibited. Their hopes are dashed at once, and they have serious 

 doubts whether they shall abandon them to their fate, or attempt to repair damages, and 

 plant anew. It is, at best, a trying dilemma. 



A gentleman who has resided for more than forty years past at Lewiston, on the Niaga- 

 ra river, told me, some years since, that he would never plant another pear tree. He had 

 planted scores of them. He had given them the best cultivation, and the closest care — I 

 know him to be a good pomologist — but the blight had, one after another, taken off nearly 

 all his trees, and no remedy which he could apply, and he had tried every thing he had 

 heard of, could prevent it. The whole country between Lewiston and Lake Ontario, was 

 alike in this particular, although it is, for other northern fruit, equal to any portion of 

 western New-York. It lies below " the mountain," which constitutes the abrubt termi- 

 nation on the north of the " Onondaga Salt groupe," of the geologists, over Avhich the Ni- 

 agara is precipitated in its fall, to the level of Lake Ontario, and is on the " Clinton 

 groupe" of rocks, a decomposable red stone, mixed with alumina, shale, sand and lime, 

 and bearing upon it a rich, heavy, wheat producing soil. From the scarp of this " moun- 

 tain," or table land, on both sides of the Niagara, running south almost on a level, to 

 within a mile of Buffalo — all within the Onondaga Salt groupe — the soil is chiefly a heavy 

 clay -loam; and on this soil, as yet, the blight has scarcely been known, till within a year 

 or two past. A few wilding trees, perhaps a mile above Tonawanda, which had been plan- 

 ted some thirty years ago, and bore abundantly, of a tolerably decent cooking and dry- 

 ing pear, have been struck with the blight, and pretty much destroyed. But they had 

 neither care nor cultivation for many years past, being on a fiirm not cultivated, but under 

 inning operation of tenants. Yet these were quite as well oared for as others which 

 w on both sides the river, in flourishing health and growth, bearing bountiful crops 



