494 



Garden and Forest. 



[Number 407. 



a short diameter of but one or two inches, while the long 

 diameter may be many times as great. Perhaps the same 

 stem may be quite regularly cylindrical a few feel above 

 and below this place. 



The Diamond Willow occurs more or less plentifully 

 throughout the entire state of South Dakota. Specimens 

 are in the college herbarium from many localities in the 

 Big Stone region, the Sioux Valley, the James Valley, the 

 Missouri Valley, the Cheyenne Valley and the Black Hills. 

 It is particularly abundant in the valleys of the Sioux and 

 the Missouri rivers. 



In eastern Nebraska, where this Willow is also quite 

 common, it is often called Red Willow. It does not form 

 diamonds so abundantly here as it does in Dakota. 



Stale Agiicul. College, Brookings, Neb. ThomaS A. WilIiat)lS. 



The Papaw, Asimina triloba. 



THE papaw is one of our native fruits which are com- 

 paratively unknown outside the region to which it is 

 indigenous. Horticultural writers have either overlooked 

 it or have known so little of it that they avoid the subject. 

 With the possible exception of Wheeling, West Virginia, and 

 Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, none of our cities ever offer it in 

 their markets. Why this should be it is hard to say, for 

 persons familiar with it, as grown and ripened in our native 

 woods, prize it more highly than any of the tropical fruits 

 sold by city venders. Perhaps this home demand con- 

 sumes a large percentage of the natural product, and thus 

 keeps it a rarity in the markets. 



I believe it is generally supposed that the papaw is pecu- 

 liarly a southern fruit and that it cannot be grown far north ; 

 this is a mistake, however, as its natural distribution is 

 quite well northward, the tree being found indigenous in 

 the province of Ontario. It is also native to sections of 

 New York, Pennsylvania and the states to the southward, 

 and in Massachusetts and New York it has been suc- 

 cessfully fruited under cultivation. The specimens pro- 

 duced in Massachusetts are said to be small in comparison 

 to the average size of the same fruit farther south. The 

 tree in its northern home is reported to be perfectly hardy, 

 however, and to have borne fruit since it was ten or twelve 

 years from the seed. At the time the above report was 

 made the tree was thirty-five years of age. 



In New Jersey, upon the grounds of Mr. Carman, editor 

 oi The Rural New-Yorker, this tree has been growing for 

 more than twenty years, the tree having originally been 

 taken from the forest. The most remarkable specimen of 

 this tree under cultivation is presumably one located upon 

 the grounds of Thomas Meehan & Sons, of Philadelphia. 

 These trees are now more than forty feet in height and a 

 foot in diameter. Other large specimens are spoken of in 

 Ohio, but, as usually met with, the Papaw is a large shrub 

 or small tree, leading one to class it among shrubs rather 

 than trees, although it is a tree in every sense of the word, 

 but, unlike many of our fruit-producers, it bears its largest 

 crops, in proportion to its size, when quite young and in a 

 comparatively shrubby form. 



The fruits are variable in size, ranging from two to six 

 inches in length and from one_to two and a half inches in 

 diameter. The flesh is soft and pulpy, much resembling 

 that of an overripe banana ; the rind is thin and adherent, 

 and is generally eaten with the pulp, which is very rich 

 and sweet — rather too sweet upon first acquaintance, but 

 not more so than some bananas. Instead of being seed- 

 less, as the tropical fruit, it contains a variable number of 

 large date-like seeds, the Papaw-seed being much larger 

 and more flattened than those of the date. The form of 

 the seeds, as well as their peculiar arrangement in the fruit, 

 is clearly shov\rn in the illustration on page 495. As will 

 be seen in the section of the fruit, the seeds are arranged 

 in a double row, one upon each side of a slight median 

 mark shown on the fruit, and they are set in edgewise in 

 two ranks, except at the ends, where a single seed caps the 

 termination of the rows. In small fruits the two rows of 



seeds are less clearly marked and an uneven number of 

 seeds is more often found. A fruit three inches long will 

 not infrequently contain seven good-sized seeds. 



The surface of the shell of the seed is glossy as though 

 varnished, and in texture is as hard as horn, being quite 

 indestructible in contact with the soil. They have fre- 

 quently been plowed up in fields where they have lain 

 twenty years or more and apparently as sound at the end 

 of that period as when first buried. It is Nature's method 

 to plant these seeds in the fall, and if we are to be success- 

 ful in propagating the tree from seeds we must imitate 

 Nature closely and plant them as soon as possible, after 

 removing them from the fruits, or stratify them in the sand 

 and plant the succeeding spring. 



The Papaw is said to be a difficult tree to transplant suc- 

 cessfully from the forest, nevertheless we know many 

 instances where such removals have proved satisfactory. 

 Like many other plants that have not been domesticated, 

 the Papaw is best transplanted when quite young and 

 small. The methods of propagating this tree deserve atten- 

 tion, for even in the wild plants we find great variations in 

 the size and season of ripening, and if this fruit is to be 

 brought under cultivation, of which it is certainly worthy, 

 we must find simple and practicable methods of perpet- 

 uating varieties. At present our only resource is to grow 

 plants from seed or from layers. By the first method we 

 can only expect valuable offspring, while the second method 

 is a slow and unprofitable way of increasing tree-fruits. 

 The art of budding and grafting this plant is, so far as I 

 can learn, unknown. 



Besides its value as a fruit-bearing plant, the Papaw oc- 

 cupies no mean place among ornamental species, and in 

 this particular it is more widely known than as a producer 

 of fruit. Its peculiar and attractively colored flower-clus- 

 ters, appearing before the leaves in the spring, would be a 

 pleasing novelty for the lawn ; its large leaves, often afoot 

 in length and four to six inches in width, give it an effect of 

 tropical luxuriance ; and after these have fallen the spheri- 

 cal furry buds of a rich brown color contrast very pleas- 

 ingly with the soft drab of the bark. One can hardly 

 understand why a native plant possessing as many worthy 

 features as this one should have remained so long in the 

 background. n r -1 ti 



West Virginia Experiment Station. ^^ ^. ^^^ OelL 



New or Little-known Plants. 



Philadelphus Falconeri. 



UNDER this name there was received at the Arnold 

 Arboretum, in 1881, from the Parsons' Nursery, in 

 Flushing, New York, the plant which is figured on page 

 497 of this issue. Of its origin nothing is known, and I 

 have not seen it in any European garden or herbarium. It 

 is certainly not an American species, and is, perhaps, only 

 a monstrous form of the widely distributed and variable 

 Philadelphus coronarius of the Himalayas and western 

 Asia. From some Japanese forms of this plant it differs 

 only in its more acute calyx-lobes and in its elongated, 

 narrow petals, which distinguish this plant from all other 

 species of Philadelphus. The fact that about thirty years 

 ago many plants were sent by Hogg and by Hall to the 

 Parsons' Nursery from Japan gives some ground for the 

 belief that Philadelphus Falconeri is of Japanese origin, or 

 that it is a Chinese plant cultivated by the Japanese in their 

 gardens, for it is not now known to Japanese botanists. 



Philadelphus Falconeri, a name which is only used pro- 

 visionally and until something more of the history and 

 origin of this plant can be determined, is a beautiful shrub 

 here, with spreading stems, eight or ten feet tall, and ovate- 

 acute, smooth, glabrous three-nerved leaves furnished above 

 the middle with a.ie\\ minute remote teeth, and about two and 

 a half inches long. The flowers are fragrant and are borne 

 in few-flowered lax panicles, on elongated slender, glabrous 

 pedicels, and are about an inch long, with ovate-acute 



