72 Plums and Plum Culture 



known in Mexico, except certain straggling specimens 

 which have crossed the Rio Grande river from Texas 

 and New Mexico. After all, except for a few sus- 

 picious curcnmstances, the Chicasaw plum behaves 

 like an indigenous species in the southern states. It 

 makes itself thoroughly at home, holding its own ter- 

 ritory in competition with native species, and for. all 

 practical purposes may be considered as belonging 

 there. 



The tree is rather small, occasionally reaching 

 a hight of twenty to twenty-five feet, with a diameter 

 of four to five inches. But usually it takes the shrubby 

 form, growing five to ten feet high, and branching 

 from the bottom. It also throws up many suckers 

 from the roots, so that the trees or shrubs are com- 

 monly found in dense thickets. 



The branches are slender, sometimes rather zig- 

 zag, lustrous when young, but becoming grayish after 

 the second year. Occasionally they are a trifle thorny, 

 by the suppression of short side branches. The leaves 

 are small and shining, trough-shaped and minutely 

 serrate with glandular teeth. The petioles are some- 

 times glandular. The flowers appear rather early. In 

 the orchard they bloom next after the early Japanese 

 varieties and with the later sorts of that class. Cluck, 

 however, is distinctly late blooming, and a few other 

 varieties are not specially early. The blossoms are 

 small, white and abundant. In general they are more 

 vigorous sexually than the blossoms of Primus amcri- 

 cana, bearing more abundant pollen and showing fewer 

 defects in the female organs. The pollen seems to be 

 very prepotent, not only upon other varieties of the 

 Chicasaw group, but upon those of the Wildgoose 

 and Japanese groups, and upon some varieties of the 

 Miner- and Americana groups. 



The fruit is mostly spherical or spheric-oval and 



