VI 



EVOLUTION OF BLACKBERRY AND DEW- 

 BERRY CULTURE 



NORTH AMERICA is the only country which can boast 

 of the cultivation of blackberries and dewberries for 

 their fruits. The hedges of Europe are full of black- 

 berries, and many of the bushes produce excellent 

 fruit, but they are too common and the bushes too 

 vicious and wayward to attract the cultivator. Now 

 and then bushes are transplanted to the gardens, but 

 there appear to be no named varieties. "Nowhere in 

 the three kingdoms," writes Grindon in his "Fruits 

 and Fruit -Trees," "is it more plentiful or of finer 

 quality than in the southern parts of Ireland. Yet 

 there, this natural gift of the soil, untaxed, uncharged 

 for, 'without money and without price,' while it might 

 be made a source of immense and permanent wealth to 

 the poorer inhabitants, is left wholly untouched ; and 

 this when we are sending millions of money every 

 year to foreign countries for fruits that have not half 

 the intrinsic worth of the ill -requited Rnbus fruti- 

 cosus." Hogg, in his great English "Fruit Manual," 

 does not mention the blackberry. 



"Perhaps it would be casting discredit on the 

 worthy ancestors who braved so many dangers in the 

 settlement of our country to charge them with undue 

 conservatism," writes Professor Card, in a sketch of 

 the blackberry, in "American Gardening," "yet it can 

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