6 WORCESTER COUNTY HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. [1895. 



Our Society may also feel proud of the fact that one of our 

 members, Prof. Joseph Jackson, has published during the past 

 season a book which will be appreciated by all lovers of nature, 

 ''Through Glade and Mead." While its style reminds one of 

 Burroughs and Thoreau, and every page breathes an invitation 

 to the woods and fields, it contains, also information of great 

 value. Its classification of the flora of Worcester County, the 

 most exhaustive which has ever yet been made, should give it a 

 place in the library of every student of botanical science. 



But my purpose to-day was to speak upon the subject of 

 " Fruit Growing in the Annapolis Valley" ; and by the Annapo- 

 lis Valley I mean, of course, the region known by that name in 

 the Province of Nova Scotia. 



More by accident than by design, I spent a few days in this 

 region last summer. In the Annapolis Valley lies the scene of 

 Longfellow's " Story of Evangeline or the land of Acadia." But 

 the whole Province was anciently known as Acadia, and in the old 

 geographies of the French it is described as a barren, inhospit- 

 able, almost uninhabitable region, extremely cold, and fettered 

 for a good portion of the year with ice and snow. But either the 

 old geogra-phers made an egregious mistake, or the temperature 

 has become most wonderfully modified since those old days : 

 for although the latitude is that of Northern New Hampshire 

 and Vermont, all the fruits which flourish with us (except, 

 perhaps, the grape, which can only be grown in favored lo- 

 calities), ripen there in abundance and perfection; all our 

 varieties of pears, peaches, plums, as well as all the small-fruits, 

 — strawberries, raspberries, currants, gooseberries. I said to 

 them, " How can you do it? How can you raise all these fruits 

 with your low temperature and fog?" But they said, " We 

 have no low temperature. It never reaches zero more than once 

 or twice during the cold season and never goes more than seven 

 below, and we have no fog. You see those mountains?" (A 

 range of mountains extending along the coast for twenty miles 

 to the northwest and called theColbequid or North Mountains). 

 "Those protect us from the northwest gales and the sea-fog. 

 You see some mornings the fog rising over the tops of the 



