84 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 
ornamental garden flower. He is putting considerable time on the improve- 
ment of the calla and aims to get a yellow calla of the same form as our 
common white calla lily. Two years ago he sent out a calla having the last- 
ing fragrance of violets and lilies. 
The results from crossing the cultivated raspberry and the Lawton 
blackberry have been some plants which produce fruit that pulls off the re- 
ceptacle like the raspberry and others that produce fruit which sticks to 
the receptacle as in the blackberry. 
In referring to the effect of stocks on the quality of fruit he said that 
the Burbank plum when ripened on Prunus simoni seemed to have the. best 
quality. 
Bud Variations in our common Calla Lily. 
Formerly Mr. Burbank made many hand crosses in order to get varia- 
tions, but by continuing this work over a long series of years he finds 
that most of the stock growing on his place is so mixed and so inclined 
to vary that he gains very little by hand crossing, and he uses straight 
seedlings of his crossed plants, from which he generally gets the best re- 
sults after the second and third generations from the cross. As his newer 
and best seedlings are all the result of careful hand crossings, he is now 
inclined to depend largely upon the work of insects and the variations re- 
sulting from former combinations. 
In discussing the improvement of the buffaloberry and other wild 
plants, he said that in his experience the most important thing had been to 
find plants that would vary, and that any plant that varied greatly from 
the original type, even though it might be a change to the worse, might 
produce seedlings that would vary widely from the type and be the basis 
of future improvement. 
He makes a special point of top-working all his seedling tree fruits and 
does not consider them fairly tested until they have been thus tried. Some 
