VARIETAL ADAPTATION OF CULINARY VEGETABLES 

 TO LOCAL CONDITIONS. 



By Will W. Tracy, Washington, D. C. 



Delivered before the Society, January 11, 1919. 



I am very glad of the opportunity to talk to you here in Horti- 

 cultural Hall, on a subject in which I am much interested — The 

 Adaptation of Plants which are Commonly Grown in Home Gardens 

 to Local Conditions — and in doing so my mind goes back some 

 sixty years when I, as a boy living at Andover, spent many an hour 

 when I was supposed to be at school or studying my Latin and 

 Greek, in tramping through the woods and fields, enjoying the 

 beauty of wild plants and wondering at the size and vigorous growth 

 of certain groups; and I put in a good many hours of hard work 

 in trying to establish new and more accessible groups of the more 

 pleasing strains. I failed in this so often that I came to the belief 

 that even the wild uncultivated plants of the fields and woods 

 often developed distinct varietal forms adapted to certain particu- 

 lar soils and exposures. 



Since then my study and work for over fifty years have been de- 

 voted to seed breeding and growing and I have carefully examined 

 and watched the growth of thousands of samples of varieties of 

 vegetables and flowers grown from the same original stock, but 

 under differing climatic and soil conditions and selected by different 

 people. I have inspected hundreds of crops grown for seed in differ- 

 ent locations from Maine to California and thus have had abundant 

 opportunity to notice differences in strains grown in this country 

 or Europe from the same original stock but under different condi- 

 tions of soil and climate, which had resulted in the development, 

 without increasing or even careful selection, but simply as the result 



