108 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



looking as the imported article and sell it as cheap. But the 

 tendency of home growers has been to charge a higher rate for 

 what they manufacture. 



A very prominent New York seed firm report to me : " We have 

 bought a good many pounds of homemade spawn from different 

 parties to distribute for trial among our customers who are practical 

 mushroom growers, who had used our imported spawn right along, 

 but in not a single case have we had any inquiry for the domestic 

 product." 



The Nkw Mushroom, Agaricus siibrufescens Peck. — In the 

 summer of 1892 I observed quantities of a rather uncouth looking, 

 wild mushroom, new to me, growing on and about the leaf-mould 

 piles at Dosoris. The mushrooms were not scattered about, one 

 here and one there, as we find them in the fields, but they grew in 

 buuches,of two, three, or more, many times a dozen or two dozen 

 growing together. But the crop was not stead}' ; there might be a 

 great quantity this week, barely any next week, an abundance the 

 week following, and so on. After a rain they would spring up 

 like magic. We had about forty loads of rotting leaves in that 

 heap, and on forking into it found a steady, gentle heat all summer 

 long, and that the spawn of the mushroom had run through the 

 whole mass, over two feet deep. The best mushrooms grew in the 

 two to three years old rotted mould. I was studying the new 

 comer with much interest. 



About that time my attention was called to the fact that a 

 neighboring fiorist was picking a large quantity of mushrooms in 

 his greenhouse and frames, and selling them in New York, getting 

 big prices for them. I went over to see him and found the rumor 

 to be true. But it was not the common mushroom at all that he was 

 growing. It was the interesting stranger which I was studying in 

 our own leaf-mould pile at home ! It appeared with him the year 

 before. He had old violet beds inside his grape and tomato house, 

 and they were full of mushrooms ; old hotbeds in his nursery were 

 run over with mushrooms, and he had mushrooms in the open 

 ground, among his asparagus, between rows of pear trees. They 

 were coming up wherever planted, like a crop of weeds, in the sun- 

 shine and shade, with apparent indifference. He was picking an 

 average of thirty-five pounds of them each day and getting from 

 eighty to ninety cents a pound for them in New York, mostly at 

 hotels. He had almost a monopoly of tlie market. He had a 



