I 1 8 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



and foliage but the fruit-producing peaches are almost never planted for 

 landscape effect though their peculiarly sunny expression in leaf and flower, 

 one of the best types of cheerfulness among trees, should make them useful 

 either standing alone or in mass for ornamental planting. Those who 

 have seen the wild wayside peaches of Kentucky or Tennessee in bloom 

 will always think of the species as an ornamental as well as a fruit-tree. 



PEACH- YELLOWS 



Yellows is a disease or malignant condition, it is not known which, 

 virulent and contagious whatever it may be, and is the possession pri- 

 marily of the region north of the Ohio and Potomac and east of the 

 Mississippi. At one time or another it has been a cause of decline of 

 the peach-orchards in every part of the region outlined. Epidemics of 

 yellows have wholly obliterated thriving peach -industries which in some 

 cases covered counties. The changes wrought by yellows come so quickly 

 and are so final, so complete and so widespread in their consequences 

 that the disease stands alone among the troubles of plants in the extent 

 of its influence on the crop affected. Under somewhat better control 

 now, its havoc is less than formerly, but in the past it has outdone all 

 other accidents combined that have happened to peaches in America., 

 including frosts, floods, drought, insects, fungi and injuries due to man and 

 quadrupeds. The mystery of yellows in most of its aspects makes its 

 known history all the more significant. We lack knowledge of what it is, or 

 whence it came, nor do we know of any cure; we know only some of the 

 circumstances and the terrible consequences to the peach. Yellows began 

 its siege of the peach in the very beginning of commercial peach-growing 

 in America. Much of the history of the peach is written in the hundred- 

 years-warfare that has ensued. 



Judge Richard Peters of Philadelphia first described and gave name to 

 peach-yellows. February ii, 1806, he read a paper "On Peach Trees" 

 before the Philadelphia Society for Promoting Agriculture. In this paper 

 we have the first clear account of yellows: ' 



" About fifty years ago, on the farm on which I now reside, my father 

 had a large peach orchard, which yielded abundantly. Until a general 

 catastrophe befell it plentiful crops had been for many years produced 



' Smith, Erwin F. U. S. D. A. Dtv. of Bot. Bui. No. 9:17, 18. r888. 

 . This reference as well as most of those that follow, was found in Bulletin 9, Division of Botany, 

 United States Department of .Agriculture, the most complete account we have of peach-yellows, whether 

 of historical facts or of natural history. 



