THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 7 1 



TREE- AND FRUIT-CHARACTERS OF THE PEACH 



Fruit-growers must largely depend on printed descriptions for 

 knowledge of varieties. A well-made description of tree or fruit, to one 

 mentally equipped to interpret it, is second only to having the real objects 

 at hand. But the difficulty is that few excepting professional pomologists 

 know the characters of even the common fruits and their relative impor- 

 tance. Before taking up either botanical or horticultural descriptions of 

 peaches, then, it is necessary to direct attention to the characters of the 

 peach, diflferences in which distingmsh species and varieties. Be it 

 remembered in this study of the characters of the peach, however, that, 

 as fields and woods offer better facilities for the botanist than the her- 

 barium, so the peach-orchard is a fitter place to study the characters of 

 the peach than a printed page. 



The single species of the peach in which we are greatly interested has 

 a very characteristic tree, the variations in which are, however, less well 

 marked than those of the tree of any other of our common fruits. The 

 peach-tree is distinguished by its low, roundish and never pyramidal head. 

 Of its gross characters, size is most important in distinguishing varieties, 

 the several more or less distinct types in the species usually being separable 

 by size alone. In considering size, proper allowance must, of course, always 

 be made for environment. There are no true dwarfs among the varieties 

 of Prunus persica cultivated in America. 



Habit of growth is nearly as important as size of tree in determining 

 varieties. Thus, a variety may be round-topped, upright-spreading or 

 drooping in habit; the head may be open or dense; the branches long or 

 short, stout or slender; the trunks may be short or long, straight or crooked, 

 much branched or little branched. These habits of growth serve not 

 only to distinguish sorts but often determine whether the tree is sufficiently 

 manageable to make a good orchard-plant. 



Hardiness is an important character both in classifying and in deter- 

 mining the orchard-value of a variety. All peaches are tender to cold as 

 compared with other tree-fruits of temperate climates but there is suffi- 

 cient difference in varieties to permit the designations hardy, half-hardy and 

 tender In the classificatory scheme in most common use in America, 

 that of Onderdonk and Price, variation in hardiness is the chief determinant 

 of groups. 



All peaches come in bearing so early and bear so regularly that varietal 

 differences in these characters scarcely count in classifying, but pro- 



