114 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



same condition as the West is at present in regard to fruit growing. 

 At last we have come to sit up and take notice, and are now just 

 beginning to reahze that we have sold our birthright, have neglected 

 our opportunities, and have allowed others to get rich on our 

 shiftlessness. Here in a natural fruit country we have imported 

 over three-fifths of the fruit consumed, making it more expensive 

 for our people to get good fruit, and forcing many to do without a 

 food which should be eaten every day as regularly as we take our 

 meals. 



No form of food is as healthful as fruit, yet its high price makes 

 it almost prohibitive to a large per cent of our people. New 

 England is a natural fruit country. We have abundant evidence 

 of this on every hand. Go into the wildest parts of the country 

 and you will find growing as they have done for hundreds of years, 

 the apple, cherry, plum, blackberry, raspberry, strawberry, goose- 

 berry, and grape. Our soils are natural fruit soils. The rugged 

 New England hills are full of the plant food necessary to grow the 

 highest quality of fruit in abundance. 



Our people are a large fruit-consuming people, which fact can 

 be easily attested by noting the arrival each day in our markets of 

 ships, trains, and wagons loaded with fruit from all parts of the 

 world ; or, if a closer point of view be necessary, consider the large 

 number of fruit-stands which now are apparent on every street, 

 to say nothing of grocery and provision stores which handle all 

 sorts of fruit. This fruit is consumed somewhere, or else the store- 

 men could not make a profit and so it is fair to assume that our 

 people use it. On the other hand, we are not a fruit-growing 

 people. This society has found it very difficult within the past 

 few years to get a fruit garden entered in its prize contests, and it 

 has been almost as difficult to get a commercial orchard or vine- 

 yard. Conditions have so changed in the past forty or fifty years 

 that while then there was keen competition between the owners 

 of gardens and farms for honors in this society along the fruit 

 growing lines, this competition has now come down largely to the 

 Hall Exhibitions, which while splendid in their way, do not give 

 the broad scope for the advancement of fruit culture that garden 

 and orchard competition would. 



The causes of this reduction in garden and commercial fruit 



