The Canadian Horticulturist. 193 



OUR OUT-DOOR GRAPES AND THEIR DEVELOP- 

 MENT FROM THE NATIVE SPECIES OF 

 NORTH AMERICA. 



S far as limits will permit, it will be our purpose to take a retro- 

 spective course along the pathway of the development of the 

 Grape, from the period of the discovery of this continent, to 

 the present day. The first colonist of North America found 

 wild grapes in profusion and distinguished the species as the 

 Fox and Frost grape. As early as 1564 wine was made of 

 them. An early writer on the subject tells us, the Rev. F. 

 Higginson of the Massachusetts Colony wrote home in 1629, 

 " Excellent vines are here up and down the woods, our Gov- 

 ernor has already planted a vineyard with great hope of increase." 



Grapes were found by the first settlers of Canada along the St. Lawrence as 

 far north as the Isle of Orleans, and we conclude that they were in abundance 

 from the fact of its being called by Jacques Cartier " Isle de Bacchus." Indeed 

 from early accounts our ancestors showed equally as much enthusiasm over the 

 grapes found indigenous to the country, as that evinced by us in this last half of 

 our century over the descendents of the same given us by nature and art. 



The late Prof. Asa Gray arranges the genus Vitis of North America into 

 four]5 divisions, viz.: Vitis Labrusca, or Fox grape; Vitis cordifolia, or Frost 

 grape ; Vitis vulpma. Muscadine, or Southern Fox grape ; and Vitis aestivalis, 

 or Summer grape. The great array of varieties now in cultivation are the result 

 of either spontaneous or of artificial hybridizing. 



Except in California and Mexico attempts on this continent to introduce 

 the European species of grapes have ultimately proved failures. While one of 

 our native species, from the resistant power of its roots to the Phylloxera, has 

 given the European vineyardist valuable stock for grafting upon, that have saved 

 their vineyards from total destruction. 



To the Vitis Labrusca of Linnaeus we owe the greater number of our present 

 varieties. Its native home is east of the Alleghany Mountains, from South Car- 

 olina extending north to Canada. It adapts itself to varied soils and conditions, 

 attaining the greatest size in the granitic soil of New England. From the class 

 known as the Northern Labrusca our most valuable hybrids have been obtained. 

 The persistence of this type is so marked that where its existence as form- 

 ing one of the parents of an hybrid has been in doubt, the question has been 

 determined by planting the seeds and the reversion of some of the seedlings 

 settled the point. 



The first variety of this species that obtained wide celebrity was introduced 

 by Mr. R. Prince of Hushing, Long Island, about 1820. He obtained it from 

 Mrs. Isabella Gibbs, who discovered it growing wild in North Carolina in 1816 



