224 THE EVOLUTION OF OUB NATIVE FRUITS 



"verging to Americana." It grows on the banks of 

 streams and margins of bottom -woods, mostly in 

 thickets. The fruit is said to be very agreeable. 

 Scheele describes the fruit as the size of cherry to 

 that of a mirabelle (myrobalan plum), half an inch to 

 an inch thick, spherical and red. The Towakong 

 Indians boil it with honey, and use it for food. 

 Coulter, in his "Flora of Western Texas," says that 

 this plum is "not uncommon on the Colorado and its 

 tributaries and extending to the upper Guadalupe and 

 the Leona." It is not in cultivation. It evidently 

 bears much the same relation to the Prunus Ameri- 

 cana that Prunus Watsoni does to the Chickasaw 

 plum* (see pages 207, 208). 



The southern sloe. The black sloe of the southern 

 states, Prunus umbellata, attains a height of twelve to 

 twenty feet, and the foliage is somewhat like narrow- 

 leaved forms of the myrobalan plum. It is distributed 

 in the maritime districts from South Carolina to Texas, 

 reaching north, in its southwestern ranges, to south- 

 ern Arkansas. Sargent says, in his "Silva," that "the 

 fruit is gathered in large quantities and is used in 

 making jellies and jams." In Florida it is sometimes 

 called Hog plum. Fruit sent me from that state was 

 orange -yellow, with faint blushes of red, or some 

 specimens pure yellow, with a thin bloom, freestone, 

 very sour and bitter. A Texas correspondent writes 

 that the fruit is usually unpleasant or disagreeable, 

 but that an occasional form bears large and good 

 fruit. Prunus umbellata is not in cultivation for its 

 fruit, and it is not likely that it can compete in 



* Scheele's Prunus Texana, of which there is a duplicate type in the her- 

 barium of the Missouri Botanical Gardens, is Prunus Americana. See p. 184. 



