THE 



VOL. v.] 



SEPTEMBER, 1882. 



[No. 9. 



THE SECKEL PEAE. 



Our readers are presented this month 

 with an accurate colored picture of the 

 venerable original pear tree from which 

 the thousands and tens of thousands of 

 Seckel Pear trees now growing in 

 Canada and the United States have 

 sprung. It is a tree to be held in re- 

 membrance, one to which the lovers of 

 pears of high quality might well make 

 a pilgrimage, and standing with bared 

 heads in the presence of this ancient 

 tree, reverently look up upon its tim^ 

 scarred branches, and count the genera- 

 tions that have gathered its luscious 

 fruit for mayhap two centuries gone. 

 This picture is copied from a photo- 

 graph taken in 1880, and published in 

 the Gardener's MontJdy for September 

 of that year. At that time the trunk 

 was a mere shell, one-half of it entirely 

 gone, but Mr. Bastian, the owner, who 

 first knew it forty years ago, said it 

 was much the same when he first knew 

 the tree as now. It measured at three 

 feet six inches from the ground, five 

 feet four and a half inches in girth 

 around the half trunk and across the 

 exposed diameter, and was twenty six 

 feet high. No one knows who planted 

 this old pear tree. Perhaps it was 



never planted, but Topsy-like, it 

 *' growed ;" and the imaginative reader 

 may draw such portrait as fancy pleases 

 of the one who dropped the seed in the 

 fertile soil, in the long time ago, whence 

 sprang this tree. Downing says that 

 the late venerable Bishop White used 

 to say that when he was but a lad, a 

 well-known cattle dealer of Philadel- 

 phia, known as " Dutch Jacob," used 

 in the early autumn to present his 

 neighbors with pears of an unusually 

 delicious flavor, but would never divulge 

 the place where they were procured. 

 In coui-se of time " Dutch Jacob " pur- 

 chased from the Holland Land Com- 

 pany the parcel of ground on which 

 stood his favorite pear tree ; but as time 

 rolled on it came at length into the 

 hands of Mr. Seckel, who introduced 

 the pear to public notice, and after 

 whom it was named. The farm now 

 belongs to Mr. Bastian, who has owned 

 it for more than forty yeai-s, and was 

 told when he moved there that the 

 Seckel family had known the tree for 

 eighty years before. 



In 1 81 9 this pear was sent to Europe, 

 and the fruit pronounced by the Lon- 

 don Horticultural Society to exceed in 



