72 



IMPORTANCE OP PLANT INTRODUCTION 



of ita utilization in this country. The work of 

 early years failed in doing the great good that it 

 was capable of because it was not systematic, 

 because no adequate records were kept, and be- 

 cause the public were not alive to its great possi- 

 bilities. Today the interest in new plants is so 

 much greater than it was twenty years ago that 

 large numbers of the really suggestive applications 

 from private experimenters cannot be met by the 

 Office for lack of funds. 



A very brief sketch of some of the interesting 

 problems that are on the program of the Office will 

 illustrate the opening vista of plant introduction as 

 a government enterprise. The largest collection of 

 date varieties ever made is now growing in gardens 

 in Arizona and California (Figs. 89, . 90). The 

 largest collection of tropical mangoes in the world 

 is in greenhouses or already in the hands of experi- 

 menters in Florida, Porto Rico and Hawaii. Thous- 

 ands of the Japanese matting rush plants, from 

 which the valuable Japanese matting is made, of 

 which this country imports several million dollars' 

 worth every year, are being grown in South Caro- 

 lina. A new and valuable salad plant from 

 Japan, the udo (Fig. 13), is being grown 

 from Maine to Flor- 

 ida. The superior 

 varieties of French 

 bur artichoke have 

 been introduced for 

 trial in the trucking re- 

 gion of the South. The 

 berseem, the greatest of 

 annual winter forage crops 

 from the Nile valley, is 

 now being grown experi- 

 mentally in the new irri- 

 gated regions of the South- 

 west (Fig. 91). Kafir corns from 

 the uplands of Abyssinia, ' the 

 east coast of Africa and India 

 are being tested in Kansas and 

 other places in the West. New 

 varieties of alfalfa, the one from 

 Turkestan, the other from Ara- 

 bia, are both attracting the attention 

 of alfalfa-growers in those sections 

 where alfalfa is the great forage crop. 

 In Alaska a newly found variety of 

 oat, from northern Finland, is proving 

 superior to all others. Before these 

 lines are printed the sisal industry of 

 Yucatan will have been given a start 

 in Porto Rico through the assistance 

 of the organization that the Office of 

 Plant Introduction has built up. At 

 the request of the State Experiment 

 Station of North Carolina, peanuts 

 have been gathered from all over the 

 world for the use of breeding experi- 

 menters in the South. Pentzia, an in- 

 teresting fodder plant of the "kar- 

 roo," has been sent to one of the bar- 

 ren islands of the Hawaiian group for 

 trial. The Hanna, a pedigreed barley 



Fig. 91. 

 Berseem 

 (TritoUvm 

 Alexan- 

 drinum). 



Fig. 90. Egyptian date palm In fiult at IniUo, California. 

 Imported by Department of Agrienltnre In 188B. 



variety from Moravia, is now being given a practi- 

 cal test by the brewers in St. Louis and California, 

 and its uniform character and good yields on the 

 Pacific coast have aleady led to its cultivation on 

 a large scale. A new root crop from Porto Rico, the 

 yautia (Figs. 114, 115, page 105, Vol. I), promi- 

 nently brought forward by Mr. Barrett, now of this 

 Office, is to be practically tried in northern Florida 

 and the Carolinas, in both of which places it has 

 proved its ability to grow. The plant from which 

 Japan makes her papers of unexcelled quality is 

 growing in the plant-introduction garden in Cali- 

 fornia (Fig. 92). The wood-oil tree of the Yang-tse 

 valley has been imported from Han Kow, and there 

 are on hand in California hundreds of plants with 

 which to make the first trials of this interesting oil- 

 producing plant, the product of which is imported 

 into America in increasing quantities every year 

 to be used for varnish and imitation rubber manu- 

 facturing purposes. The hardy bamboos of the 

 Orient have been imported, and, as far as the funds 

 of the Office have allowed, these have been placed 

 at several places in the South where the old cane- 

 brakes," which are growths of a commercially 

 worthless species of bamboo, indicate that the 

 valuable kind from Japan may be expected to grow 

 successfully. Answering an appeal from the rice- 

 planters of the Carolinas, whose plantations have 

 been devastated by a very serious disease, rices of 

 the type of the famous Carolina Golden have been 

 imported from the Orient, Africa, the West Indies 

 and Italy, with the hope of finding one that will 

 resist the disease. This hope has not yet been ful- 

 filled, although there is one variety at least that 

 has some promise of being useful in the rice-fields 

 of the region. An early introduction of one of the 

 agricultural explorers was the fenugreek, a plant 

 the seeds of which, when ground, form the body of 

 most of the condition powders so much used by 

 raisers of fat-stock show animals; and although 

 the manufacturers of these condition powders still 

 import their seed from abroad, the Califomians 



