204 MINNESOTA STATE HOKTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



IMPROVEMENT OF PLANTS. 



PRES. W. W. PENDERGAST, HUTCHINSON. 

 THE SAND CHERRY. 



The first thing to be done in the attempt to change over wild 

 forms now worthless but holding out some promise that they will 

 respond to proper cultivation and finally become valuable plants, is 

 to establish a variation from the present stereotype pattern. These 

 variations may be brought about in many ways, but principally by 

 change in environment, by hybridization and by selection. To de- 

 pend on natural selection alone would mean absolute failure. Great 

 changes would in time occur from this cause, but they would not be 

 of the kind we want. They would not correspond to our ideal. 

 Artificial selection would be finally successful, but that "finally" is 

 too far in the future. 



A new, hardy and perfectly satisfactory cherry would be a 

 great boon to the people of the northwest. In all kinds of fruit we 

 can easily find or produce numberless varieties all of which are 

 large, beautiful and delicious, many of them so nearly perfect as to 

 answer every required condition except that of hardiness. A change 

 from tender to hardy means an entire change in the character of the 

 tree, to effect which is a tedious process, requiring many life-times. 

 For illustration, a new variety of tomatoes or beans can be established 

 to order in a few years in accordance with the ideal of the man 

 who orders it, but to make either of these plants hardy enough to 

 withstand a severe frost would require many hundreds of years, and 

 the result would be a fruit very dissimilar to the original. Every 

 other quality would have to be sacrificed to the Moloch of hardi- 

 ness. 



In the sand cherry we have a fruit which for generations un- 

 numbered has, in its severe struggle for existence, been obliged to 

 submit to the hardest conditions of scant soil; still scantier moisture 

 and a most trying climate, in which tropical summers alternate with 

 winters of arctic cold and almost arctic length. All these forbidding 

 circumstances have done what man would have hardly had the cour- 

 age to attempt, on account of the time required. That which is left 

 for us to do after so good a start is much less difficult, and we should 

 not be deterred from the undertaking by any obstacles with which 

 we are likely to meet. 



Changes of latitude, altitude, heat, light ; soil with its scores of 

 Variations in sand, clay, marl, humus ; its fertilizing elements, ni- 

 trates, phosphates, potash, etc. ; its mechanical condition, density, 

 porosity, compactness, friability, uniformity — all cause changes in 



