NEW PLANT 
which are done in Japan and China. But 
all these things aside, the bamboo still 
remains one of the most promising plant 
introductions. 
While perhaps the great majority of 
these new plants are brought in or pur- 
chased directly as results of investiga- 
tions carried on in Washington, some of 
the most valuable things have been sent 
in by men and women living as mission- 
aries or voluntary exiles in the most 
out-of-the-way places in the world. 
Plant introduction is not a matter of 
one generation, and it is most preémi- 
nently a work requiring many men work- 
ing together, and | doubt if there is to 
be found within the government service, 
or outside of it, a better example of 
cooperative, constructive investigation 
than that connected with the Bureau of 
Plant Industry in the establishment of 
new plant industries in the United States. 
On the streets of almost any Japanese 
city the fruit and vegetable stalls have 
for sale an attractive blanched vegetable 
called udo. It is a near relative of a 
well-known wild plant in New England, 
the spikenard, but a much larger plant. 
There are many ways in which it is pre- 
pared by both the Japanese and the for- 
eigners who live in Japan; but, either as 
a salad or cooked in the same way in 
which asparagus is cooked, it deserves to 
rank as one of the important vegetables 
of the world. It is easy to grow; it does 
not require replanting oftener than once 
in nine or ten years; it can be cropped 
in the autumn or in the spring, and it 
yields large crops of shoots, which are 
often two feet long and an inch or more 
in diameter at the base. These brilliant 
white shoots are edible to their very 
bases without the least objectionable 
fiber, and not in this respect like aspara- 
gus, of which only the tips are fit to eat. 
It was while traveling with Mr. Bar- 
bour Lathrop that the writer first made 
the acquaintance of this vegetable and at 
his suggestion that plants of it were sent 
to America, in 1902. 
One of our best-known botanical au- 
thorities once remarked to me: “You 
cannot introduce a new vegetable; it’s 
impossible.” While it might be admitted 
IMMIGRANTS 907 
that the introduction of a new vegetable 
is a long undertaking, extending perhaps 
over the period of a generation, it should 
not be left out of account that the means 
at our disposal today are immeasurably 
more powerful than they were even two 
decades ago. The advent of the great 
hotels and the sympathetic interest of the 
great magazines are two elements which 
today make possible what yesterday 
would have been quite impossible. 
The magazines will talk about a new 
vegetable and can now illustrate it as 
never before and in this way encourage 
people to ask for it, and the great hotels 
have learned how to profit by the intro- 
duction of novelties. 
Of course, from the narrow standpoint 
of the asparagus grower we should all 
eat asparagus, and he watches every sign 
that indicates any tendency on the part 
of the public to consume more of his 
vegetable, and he is not often likely to 
look with favor on any rival. But let 
fancy prices be established by a legiti- 
mate publicity and the encouragement of 
some of the large hotels, and the growers 
of asparagus will soon find out that there 
is money in growing the new vegetable. 
We can trust to a final readjustment of 
things, once the new plant is thoroughly 
established. 
It was with this point in view that an 
arrangement was made with the National 
Geographic Society, at its last Annual 
Banquet, to serve as one of the courses 
the dasheen, which is the root of a large- 
leaved plant related to the Hawaiian 
taro. The guests of the Society were 
kind enough to pass judgment on this 
new introduction, deciding it to be a 
valuable addition to the menu, many even 
going so far as to declare that it sur- 
passed the potato in excellence. 
The stimulus given to the cultivation 
of this dasheen by this exhibition has 
been very great and today thousands 
have heard of it, and, if they saw it 
offered on the menu of a first-class hotel, 
would be much more likely to call for it 
than if they had never read of its pecu- 
liar adaptability to the moist but well- 
drained lands of the Southern States. 
