2OO Success with Small Fruits. 



surface and stalks hairy and glandular, the middle one long-stalked and sometimes 

 heart-shaped ; flowers racemed, rather large, with short bracts ; fruit oblong or 

 cylindrical. 



" R. Canade'nsis, Low Blackberry or Dewberry. Rocky and sandy soil ; long 

 trailing, slightly prickly, smooth or smoothish, and with three to seven smaller 

 leaflets than in the foregoing, the racemes of flowers with more leaf-like bracts, the 

 fruit of fewer grains and ripening earlier." 



The R. Cuneifolius, or Sand Blackberry, is common in the sandy 

 ground and barrens from New Jersey southward ; the R. Trivialis, Southern 

 Low Blackberry, is found in light soils from Virginia southward ; the R. 

 Hispidus is a Running Swamp Blackberry whose long, slender stems 

 creep through low, damp woods and marshes ; the R. Spectabilis 

 produces purple solitary flowers, and grows on the banks of the 

 Columbia River in the far North-West. Whatever improvements may 

 originate from these species in the future, they have not as yet, to my 

 knowledge, given us any fine cultivated variety. 



R. Fruticosus is the best-known European species, but neither has it, 

 as far as I can discover, been the source of any varieties worthy of favor. 

 It is said to have a peculiar flavor, that produces satiety at once. The 

 blackberry, therefore, is exceptional, in that we have no fine foreign 

 varieties, and Mr. Fuller writes that he cannot find " any practical informa- 

 tion in regard to their culture in any European work on gardening." 



The " bramble " is quite fully treated in Mr. R. Thompson's valuable 

 English work, but I find little to interest the American reader. He 

 suggests that the several native species that he describes are capable of 

 great improvement, but I cannot learn that such effort has ever been made 

 successfully. I do not know of any reason why our fine varieties will not 

 thrive abroad, under conditions that accord with their nature. 



In America there are innumerable varieties, since Nature produces wild 

 seedlings on every hill-side, and not a few seeds have been planted by horti- 

 culturists, in the hope of originating a prize berry. Nature appears to 

 have had the better fortune, thus far, for our best variei; s are chance 

 seedlings, found growing wild. 



It is not so many years since the blackberry was regarded as merely a 

 bramble in this country, as it now is abroad, and people were content with 

 such fruit as the woods and fields furnished. Even still, in some localities, 

 this supply is so abundant as to make the culture of the blackberry 

 unprofitable. But, a number of years since, Mr. Lewis A. Seacor led to 

 better things, by observing on the road-side, in the town of New Rochelle, 

 Westchester county, New York, a bush flourishing where Nature had 



