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CALIFORNIA FIG INDUSTRY. 



By B. M. LELONG, Secretary of the State Board of Horticulture, and ex officio Chief 



Horticultural Officer. 



The fig is probably the oldest of all cultivated fruits. It is mentioned 

 in the first book of the Bible, and is more frequently referred to in both 

 the Old and New Testaments than any other fruit. Herodotus alludes 

 to it, and in the early history of our race it played an important part 

 among food products. The Greeks received the tree from Caria, whence 

 its name, Ficus carica, but improved the fruit so greatly that Attic figs 

 became celebrated and were in large demand, so much so that stringent 

 laws regulating their export were enacted. Pliny mentions several 

 varieties, and alludes especially to that produced in Ebusus as highly 

 esteemed by Roman epicures, and mentions the Roman fig as supplying 

 a large part of the food of the slaves, especially of those engaged in 

 agricultural pursuits, by whom large quantities were eaten raw at the 

 time of the fig harvest. It is probably a native of the eastern Mediter- 

 ranean regions, but has spread from its original home over a large por- 

 tion of the known world. It is to-day found in all the warm, temperate, 

 sub-tropic, and northern tropical zones. It flourishes on the plains of 

 northwestern India, on the Himalayas to an elevation of five thousand 

 feet, in Afghanistan, northern Persia, Asia Minor, Palestine, northern 

 Africa, and the warmer parts of Europe, ripening its fruit in sheltered 

 places, even so far north as the southern portion of England. It has 

 been naturalized in Australia, the north island of New Zealand, Chile, 

 California, and other portions of the United States. It flourishes in 

 Florida and the Southern States, and will grow and bear fruit in the 

 open air of some of the Middle States with proper care. In California, 

 of all the States in the Union, it appears to attain its most thrifty 

 growth, and some trees now growing in this State are phenomenally 

 large. Immense trees, the largest in this State, of the White Adriatic 

 fig, grow at Knight's Ferry, in Stanislaus County. They bear enormously, 

 and are a source of great profit to their owner. 



One of these is sixty feet in height, its branches shading a circle of 

 seventy feet diameter. At its base the trunk is eleven feet in circum- 

 ference, and at three feet from the ground it is nine feet around. Several 

 large branches divide the tree a little above this point, each of which 

 has a circumference of nearly five feet; while at a distance of thirty 

 feet from the ground the limbs have a diameter of seven to eight inches. 

 The largest grove in this vicinity consists of fifteen massive black fig 

 trees, set at a distance of sixty feet apart, yet intermingling their boughs 

 overhead until a dense shade is formed beneath them. 



At Rancho Chico, in Butte County, is a fig tree planted in 185G, 

 which measures eleven feet in circumference one foot from the ground. 

 Its branches have been trained to the ground, where they have struck 

 root and formed new trunks, until they cover an area of a hundred feet 

 in diameter. 



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