IQ4 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



However, while in the beginning of this chapter I ex- 

 pressed great confidence in the final success of the Japan 

 plums in the far South, I must admit that the present season 

 of '96 has witnessed a very general and entirely unexplained 

 failure. This fact is puzzling many who have planted freely, 

 and others who desire to plant. There has been no frost at 

 all to damage the blooms, and the Robinson, Wild Goose, 

 Indian Chief and other Chickasaw varieties are all loaded 

 down, yet the Japan plums in the same orchards have not 

 only cast all or nearly all their fruit, on trees of all ages, from 

 three to six years, but straggled along for more than a month 

 in blooming, and to-day, the first of May, blooms are still 

 opening. There is unquestionably a cause for this queer 

 conduct, and after studying over it for a month, and with a 

 full knowledge of the general failure of the Marianna as a 

 stock for these plums elsewhere, I am of the opinion that 

 this freak is largely due to a decided want of congeniality 

 between the Japan race and the Marianna stock here also. 

 While the Marianna has become immensely popular as a 

 stock for other plums, both because of its vigorous growth 

 and the fact of striking so readily from cuttings, and never 

 suckering, and while it may yet, perhaps, be the best of all 

 stocks at the North, there is indubitable evidence to prove 

 that the Japan plums are very short-lived when worked upon 

 it in Texas and the South, and that it will generally kill a 

 peach at the end of the first and always the second year. 

 Complaints on this score have been general for some time, 

 and many nurserymen are abandoning its use altogether, pre- 

 ferring to work the Japan plums entirely on the peach, which 

 experience has shown to be particularly adapted to that race. 



I was at Hitchcock recently, and saw a six-year-old 

 Burbank plum tree, one of the four oldest on my former 

 place, which had recently died without the slightest visible 

 cause. A careful examination, after being dug up, showed 

 the roots to have been apparently healthy, with not the 

 slightest sign of root tumor or rot, and its growth had been 

 extraordinary, and yet it is now dead, and one of the others 

 is plainly doomed. I saw the same results the past season at 



