NEW PLANT IMMIGRANTS 
899 
bears good crops of fruit. 
from the Crimea. 
to come into prominence and find their 
way to the tables of the poor as well as 
of the rich. The heat of our American 
summers is forcing us to study the hot- 
weather diets of other countries, and 
dates are sure to become important items 
of food. 
The persimmon of the South, on which 
the opossum fattens, is a very different 
fruit from its relative the kaki, or per- 
simmon of the Orient, the growing of 
which is so great an industry in Japan 
as to nearly equal the Japanese orange- 
growing industry in importance. Our 
persimmon is a wild fruit, which will 
some day be domesticated, while the kaki 
has been cultivated so long that it is 
represented by hundreds of distinct 
varieties of different forms and colors. 
It is true that the Oriental persimmon 
has been grown in this country; in fact, 
the census records a production of 68 
Photo by Frank N. Meyer 
THE HARDIEST BEARING OLIVE TREES OF WHICH WE HAVE ANY RECORD 
A variety which has with'stood a temperature of 2 degrees F. below zero, and which 
Cuttings of this variety have been secured by Mr. Frank Meyer 
tons; but this is scarcely a beginning as 
compared with the 194,000 tons which is 
the output of Japan. 
We have misunderstood the persim- 
mon. Our own wild ones we can eat 
only after they have been touched by the 
frost, and the imported Japanese ones 
we have left until they become soft and 
mushy and almost on the verge of decay. 
We never thought until quite recently of 
wondering whether in a land where the 
persimmon had been cultivated for cen- 
turies they would not have worked out 
some artificial method for removing the 
objectionable pucker. In Japan we find 
this is done by packing the fruit in bar- 
rels saturated with sake, and Mr. H. C. 
Gore, of the Department of Agriculture, 
is now working out new methods of pro- 
cessing the Oriental persimmon, so that 
it can be eaten when hard as an apple, 
and there will no longer be any reason 
