130 OUR COMMON FRUITS. 



tical skill, in various parts of tlie country and with diffe- 

 rent varieties of grapes, but always ending in disappoint- 

 ment and failure. 



The efforts made to bring the native vines into use 

 have resulted far more successfully, for, much superior in 

 hardiness and productiveness to the foreign sorts, though 

 the more attention they receive the better the fruit be- 

 comes, yet little more culture is absolutely required than 

 to* train the branches up poles or along a trellis, when 

 they will continue from year to year to bring forth fruit 

 abundantly, and the most improved varieties are therefore 

 among the most valuable fruits of the Middle States, 

 since they are easily available to the farmer and common 

 gardener, to whom the delicately constituted foreign grape, 

 which needs so much care, would be quite beyond attain- 

 ment. In the rich alluvial soil of Western America the 

 plants sometimes attain enormous size, vines having been 

 found on the banks of the Ohio with a stem measuring 

 3 ft. in circumference, and branches 200 ft. long ; but the 

 cultivator must of course repress such exuberance if fine 

 fruit is to be attained. Still an extraordinary degree of 

 fertility, as compared with ordinary European vines, is 

 often manifested by these growths of America, one grow- 

 ing near New York having been known to yield 12 bushels 

 of fruit in a single year, while one raised near Baltimore 

 bore in the course of a season 54,490 bunches, without 

 reckoning small immature ones, which amounted to about 

 3,000 more. Downing, in his Fruits of America, gives a 

 tolerably long list of names and descriptions under the 

 head of " Native Grapes," which, however, is hardly satis- 

 factory as proving their unquestionable right to that de- 

 nomination, when intended to imply that they are of 

 purely aboriginal descent, for while some are admitted to 

 IDC probably or even certainly seedlings from foreign sorts, 

 the others, or at least those which have good characters 

 assigned to them, are marked as of " uncertain origin," 

 and therefore are open to the suspicion of being of similar 

 parentage. The one most largely cultivated is the Ca- 

 tawba, which is characterized as being one of the hardiest, 

 most productive, and excellent of the native varieties, 



