78 STATE POMOLOQICAL SOCIETY. 



nurseries then appeared. Those who could resist importunities to 

 give orders, made much talk of setting orchards with home-grown 

 trees ; and being advised that the}- could be set in either spring or 

 fall, and as the trees were in stock in quantity in their neighborhood, 

 few were quite ready to take them in spring, and would defer to fall. 

 In fall they would conclude to wait till spring. 



The deep snows of winter and excessive cold wrought havoc on 

 the nurser}' ; and at the end of a few 3'ears I cleaned the thing up 

 and discharged it in the smoke of a few brush-heaps. The maker 

 of the county map honored m}^ place as the nursery — all else was 

 emptiness. I never received 25 cents a day for the time I had given 

 •it. Let the work of the tree peddlers go on. I can buy a better 

 tree than I can grow hei'e ; — and what is more, we are almost sure, 

 with each tree bought, to get new fruit, unheard of before and not 

 ordered. 



Names are important things in fruit matters. The origin and 

 histor)' of a choice variety sometimes seems to confer honor and 

 diguit}' upon the localit}^ producing it, so that men contend for that 

 honor when the matter of place happens to rest in doubt. This is 

 seen in the case of the Baldwin apple. I raise a question in regard 

 to the 



ORIGIN OF THE HUBBARDSTON NONSUCH. 



I asked a friend in Barre, Mass., for scions of that variety. On 

 sending them he expressed regret that he had not received notice a 

 few daj's earlier, as he had occasion to pass the original tree in the 

 adjoining town of Hubbardston. As it was, he was able to take 

 them from a tree he knew to be engrafted from the original. These 

 scions soon produced fruit, and 3'ou may imagine ni}^ surprise on 

 finding it identical in appearance with that from my father's grafting 

 thirty 3^ears before. I then sent samples of both to S. W. Cole, 

 editor of the New England Farmer^ as the then best authority', and 

 he pronounced them alike and true to the name. I then visited the 

 neighliorhood where my father obtained his scions, thirty miles and 

 more south of Hubbardston, and in an earlier settled portion of the 

 State, and there in Cliarlton and Southbridge, in Massachusetts, and 

 Thompson, in Connecticut, in the oldest orchards, found trees bearing 

 this same apple — trees of the largest size and greatest age, and 

 giving no sign of being grafted in the tops. Tliey surely were 

 grafted at the root. Doubting the claim of origin, I then obtained 



