152 Fruits and Fruit- Trees. 



as a home fruiting-plant. Much swampy land still exists 

 that might be utilized for the culture. So easily is it culti- 

 vated, and so pretty withal, in flower, that wherever a little 

 peat-bog can be formed in a garden, resting on a bed of 

 porous material, and with free circulation of air above, 

 success is certain, and the produce of blossom and fruit 

 great and delightful. The cranberries imported from 

 North America and Newfoundland contain at times a 

 slight admixture of the fruit of yet another species, the 

 Oxycoccos erythrocarpus. The derivation and meaning of 

 the name cranberry are unknown. Gerard does not use 

 it. With him it is the fen-berry. 



THE ELDER-BERRY (Sambucus nigra). . 



FEW trees are better known to people in general than 

 the old-fashioned and homely Elder of every country 

 hedge, and of back-gardens and dull corners where 

 nothing else will grow, in the suburbs of probably every 

 town in England. Though in such localities as these, 

 usually lumpish and ungraceful, under favourable condi- 

 tions it can become really handsome. An elder that till 

 recently grew near Perth was thirty feet high, bearing a 

 finely-balanced round head, upon the summit of a sub- 

 stantial trunk twice as tall as a man ; and when covered, 

 as the elder always is at midsummer, with its countless 

 broad clusters of cream -white bloom, and again in 



