94 THE STRAWBERRY IN NORTH AMERICA 



Then, as now, some men were looking for the easiest 

 way to grow strawberries. At the 1876 meeting of the 

 Iowa Horticultm'al Society, Amos Kemble announced 

 that he had found it : " The easiest way of growing 

 strawberries that I know of is that used by James Smith 

 of Des Moines ; that is, orchard culture among trees ten 

 to fifteen years old. The berries, Downer's Prolific, had 

 been planted for five years and cultivated each year by 

 running over the whole bed with a plow or harrow after 

 the crop had been picked ; and this was all the cultiva- 

 tion given. The only protection w^as the trees and the 

 leaves that fell from them. I found a good crop of nice 

 large berries grown at an expense of less than two dollars 

 an acre for cultivation and protection." Fortunately, 

 this easy-going method did not commend itself generally. 

 Since 1870 the methods of renewing matted rows have 

 improved constantly; now a renewed bed frequently is 

 more profitable than a new setting. 



Early History of the Pollination Question 



The fact of the separation of the sexes in some kinds 

 of strawberries was first observed by Duchesne in 1760. 

 Following Linnaeus, all botanists had persisted in classi- 

 fying the strawberry as hermaphrodite, since it is mainly 

 so in nature; the effect of cultivation and hybridization 

 upon the sexual organs of certain varieties either had 

 been unnoticed or ignored. At the age of nineteen, 

 Duchesne published his remarkable "Histoire Naturelle 

 des Fraisiers," in which he described all the known 

 varieties, classified them according to botanical origin 

 and reported observations upon sex in the Hautbois. 

 At that time it was the popular belief that the Hautbois 



