106 THE PEACHES OF NEW YORK 



by fruits of large size, great beauty, tender skin and flesh, good quality and 

 vigorous trees which bear abundantly and regularly. The group has 

 received careful study at the Delaware Experiment Station, an account 

 of it by G. Harold Powell having been published in the Thirteenth Annual 

 Report from that Station in 1901. Powell prefers to call the group Chinese 

 Cling rather than North China. 



The peaches put in the North China group are so nearly akin to those 

 in the Persian group that it is difficult to place varieties. All agree, how- 

 ever, in taking the European Shanghai, the American Chinese Cling, as 

 the type- variety and, though it is probable that travelers or missionaries 

 brought pits of some of these peaches from northern China a century or 

 more ago, the known history of the group begins with the variety just 

 named as the type. It is a pleasure to give Robert Fortune, the inde- 

 fatigable collector of Chinese plants for the London Horticultural Society, 

 credit for introducing these peaches into western countries. In 1844 

 Fortune collected a fine, large, delicious peach near Shanghai and in the 

 autumn forwarded pits and a plant in a pot to London. The pits were 

 sown and the seedlings produced fruit in 1852 and from among these a sort 

 was selected and called Shanghai.' Pits from this first collection were 

 probably sent to France, for the name appears in the early fifties in the 

 pomological literature of this country. 



The first American reference to the Shanghai is found in 1851 ^ when 

 fruits were exhibited at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston 

 by R. Choate with the statement " peach from a tree imported from 

 Shanghai." More definite are the facts of an importation made by Charles 

 Downing in 1850. Early in that year Downing received potted peach-trees 

 from the British consul at Shanghai under the names " Chinese Cling " 

 and " Shanghai," supposed to be two sorts but proving to be identical. 

 One of these trees was sent to Mr. Henry Lyons, Columbia, South Carolina, 

 and this bore fruit in 1851.' From Downing's stock the variety was 

 quickly and widely distributed and the horticultural magazines of the 

 time gave the new peaches wide publicity, so that, from this and other 

 importations which were made from time to time by various persons, these 

 peaches from northern China were universally grown in the peach-orchards 

 of America within a quarter of a century of their introduction. 



^ Jour. Land. Horl. Soc. 221. 1846; 1. c. 265. 1852. 



' Mag. Hort. 475. 1851. 



^ Horticulturist 286, ^~2. 1853. 



