February 7, 1894.] 



Garden and Forest. 



55 



Pyrus Tschonoskii (see figure on page 55 of this issue), 

 which is a Pear-tree, rather than an Apple as described by 

 Maximowicz, is, as we saw it, a tree thirty to forty feet in 

 height, with a trunk about a foot in diameter covered with 

 smooth pale bark, and a narrow round-topped head. The 

 branchlets are stout, terete and marked with small oblong 

 or circular orange-colored lenticels ; during their first sum- 

 mer they are red-brown, rather lustrous, covered with 

 loose pale tomentum, and encircled at the base by the 

 conspicuous ring-like scars left by the falling of the 

 inner scales of the winter-buds ; later they grow darker, 

 and sometimes nearly black. The winter-buds are ovate, 



oblique veins running to the principal teeth and connected 

 by reticulate cross veinlets ; they are borne on slender 

 terete petioles an inch and a half in length. The flowers are 

 unknown. The fruit, which is usually solitary, or is some- 

 times in clusters of two or three, is obovate, pointed at the 

 base and crowned with the thickened and partly immersed 

 calyx-lobes, which are triangular, obtuse and covered with 

 a thick coat of dense white tomentum ; it is an inch long, 

 two-thirds of an inch broad, of a dull yellow color, and rosy- 

 red on one side, with a thick skin covered with pale lenti- 

 cels, and austere coarse granular flesh. The seed is a quar- 

 ter of an inch long, obliquely obovate, acute at the base 



Fig. 9. — Pyrus Tschonoskii. 



obtuse, and rather less than a quarter of an inch long, and 

 are covered with loosely imbricated chestnut-brown lus- 

 trous scales, tomentose above the middle and ciliate on the 

 margins. The leaves are ovate, acuminate, unequally 

 rounded or wedge-shaped at the base, and coarsely and 

 unequally serrate with rigid glandular teeth, which are 

 largest and most unequal above the middle of the leaf; 

 they are thick and firm, dark green, lustrous and pilose on 

 the upper surface, coated on the lower surface and on the 

 petioles with thick pale, close tomentum, four to five inches 

 long and two to three inches broad, with stout midribs im- 

 pressed on the upper side, five or six pairs of conspicuous 



and covered with a light red-brown shining coat. The fruit is 

 borne on a stout rigid stem an inch to an inch and a halt 

 long and coated with pale loose tomentum, especially to- 

 ward the much thickened apex. 



Pyrus Tschonoskii is the only indigenous Pear-tree 

 which has been discovered in Japan, where the con- 

 tinental Pyrus Sinensis, a common cultivated fruit-tree in 

 all parts of the empire, has occasionally become natural- 

 ized. 



We were fortunate in securing a supply of the ripe seeds 

 of this tree, which may be expected to prove hard}' in the 

 northern states. C. S. S. 



