STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 143 



our desire increasing to see the man who had left such a good 

 example here, so we went on to Chatfield, and the fii'st call we 

 made was at the home of Mr. Greenman, but as "bid luck" 

 would have it, he was away from home and we did not see him. 

 By permission of Mrs. Greenman, we took a hurried look at his 

 fine place, and found everything in "apple pie order." He is 

 making a specialty of the grape, as usual, of which he has a 

 large and fine assortment. Our next objective point is the Brook 

 Kidron, twenty miles south of Rochester, in Fillmore County. 

 This is the native home of the Abies Alba, Finns Strobus, Abies 

 Balsamea, Taxus Canadensis, and Juniperus Virginiana. In a 

 letter read a few days ago from Robt. Douglas, post-marked 

 New York, Dec. 28, 1886, he writes: -'The Abies Alba is a 

 northern tree, and will grow better and faster with you than 

 further south. I have to-day been examining that tree in com- 

 pany with the superintendent of Central Fark. It does very 

 poorly here, as the soil is very dry and very poor. I have seen 

 very fine Abies Alba both in the Black Hills and in the Adiron- 

 dacks, but I think the finest I have seen under cultivation was 

 in the college grounds at Toronto, where I stopped over one day 

 to examine the old planting (over fifty years old) on the college 

 grounds." We think there is no better authority on evergreens 

 in the Northwest than E. Douglas, and that he is right in regard 

 to its doing better here than further south, and if there is a 

 taller specimen on the continent than we found on the little 

 babbling brook Kidron, we have not yet heard from it. This 

 tree is said to be one hundred feet high, but we think it would 

 fall considerably short of that figure. We next call at the 

 Partridge House, in Fleasant Grove, Olmsted County. Here we 

 found the Wealthy again in good bearing condition, as well as 

 Duchess and some other varieties; and lastly at the beautiful 

 stock farm of J. S. Whitney, postmaster at Groesbeck, Olmsted 

 County. Mr. Whitney is a Wisconsin man, and a great lover of 

 fruit, and has started a fine orchard, and as we have good reason 

 to believe, will soon have the best orchard in all that section,- 

 but he says he wants no Dayton, Ohio, trees in his. We reach 

 Rochester in time for dinner and take the train soon after, and 

 meet our chairman the same evening, "cheek by jowl " with that 

 old veteran pomologist, Chas. Luedloff, of Carver County. We 

 will let our chairman tell the balance of the story, as our 

 "best man" is none too gifted to show up this fine place as its 

 merits demand. 



