56 MASSACHUSETTS HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 



named are: the anonas and their kin from Florida; the native 

 crabapples and thorn-apples; the wine-berry, the buffalo-berry 

 and several wild cherries; the cloud-berry prized in Labrador; 

 the crow-berry of cold and Arctic America; the high-bush cran- 

 berr}'^; native mulberries; opuntias and other cacti for the deserts; 

 the paw-paw, the persimmon, and the well-known and much-used 

 salal and salmon berries of the west and north. 



The pecan, the chestnut and the hickory-nut are the only native 

 nuts domesticated, but some time forest and waste places can be 

 planted not only to the nuts named, but to improved varieties of 

 acorns, beechnuts, butternuts, filberts, hazels, chinquapins and 

 nutpines, to utilize waste lands, to diversify diet and to furnish 

 articles of food that can be shipped long distances and be kept 

 from year to year. The fad of today which substitutes nuts for 

 meat may become a necessity tomorrow. Meanwhile it is interest- 

 ing to note that the pecan has become within a few decades so 

 important a crop that optimistic growers predict in another half 

 century that pecan groves will be second only to the cottonfields 

 in the south. A bulletin from the United States Department of 

 Agriculture describes 67 varieties, of which more than a million 

 and a half trees have been planted. 



It is doubtful whether we are to change general agriculture much 

 by the domestication at this late date of new native grains, though 

 many may well be introduced from other regions and wonderful 

 improvement through plant-breeding is, as all know, now taking 

 place. Raw material exists in America for domestication, but it 

 is not probable that we shall ever use it extensively. 



There are, however, a number of native vegetables worth cul- 

 tivating. The native beans and teparies in the semi-arid and sub- 

 tropical southwest to which Freeman, of the Arizona station, has 

 called attention, grown perhaps for thousands of years by the 

 aborigines, seem likely to prove timely crops for the dry-farmers 

 of the southwest. Professor Freeman has isolated 70 distinct 

 types of these beans and teparies, suggesting that many horti- 

 cultural sorts may be developed from his foundation stock. The 

 ground-nut, Apios tuberosa, furnished food for the French at Port 

 Royal in 1613 and the Pilgrims at Plymouth in 1620, and as a crop 

 for forests might again be used. There are a score or more species 



