Our Plant Immigrants 



187 



taken for an Italian spy, and the exami- 

 nation of all my belongings only served 

 to increase the suspicion, for it revealed 

 Italian notes on abstruse botanical sub- 

 jects. For hours I fought in poor Italian 

 for a release, but not until I found, in a 

 pocket that had been overlooked, a 

 Treasury check for some small amount, 

 and insisted that this was my paper of 

 citizenship, did the guard reluctantly let 

 me go, and I left the town as quickly as 

 I could, cutting from some citron trees 

 as I went, however, enough scions or bud 

 sticks to graft a small orchard. 



It was my pleasure, ten years after 

 this, to visit in southern California the 

 orchard that was the result of the intro- 

 duction of these scions. The industry is 

 on a paying basis today, and Dr West- 

 lake, of Duarte, has his own factory in 

 which he candies a grade of citron that 

 he claims is more digestible than any 

 now sold on our markets. 



UDO, A N£W JAPANESE SALAD PLANT 



While there is nothing that has been 

 found yet that will compare with let- 

 tuce as a salad plant, the Japanese have 

 a vegetable that will give a welcome 

 variety. In Japan it is as common as 

 celery is with us, and is so popular that 

 it is canned and sent to this country for 

 the use of the thousands of Japanese 

 who live here. It is used cooked with 

 Soy sauce and in many other ways, but 

 it might never have been introduced 

 into America but for the fact that a 

 young American girl, Miss Fanny, El- 

 dredge, adopted the thick, blanched 

 shoots, two feet long or more, as a 

 salad. By shaving them into long, 

 thin shavings, and serving with a 

 French dressing, she produced a salad 

 with a distinct flavor of its own, a 

 crispness that was unusual, and a pretty 

 silvery appearance. It was found to be 

 a most vigorous grower, resembling a 

 soft wooded shrub more than anything. 

 The methods of its culture were 

 worked out, and seeds were obtained 

 and distributed to hundreds of private 

 experimenters scattered from Nova 



Scotia to California and from Maine to 

 Florida, and the result has been that 

 shoots suitable for the table have been 

 produced in a dozen places, chiefly on 

 the Atlantic coast. It has grown al- 

 most if not quite as well in Washington 

 as in Japan, and has shown itself a 

 heavy yielder. Seedlings have in one 

 year produced astonishing masses of 

 roots, from which quantities of the 

 blanched shoots have been grown in a 

 dark chamber or under a mound of earth. 



THE TROPICAL MANGO 



Many people think they know what 

 mangos taste like because they have 

 eaten some fruit by that name sold in 

 one of the fruit stores of our cities. 

 The fruits that are offered now as man- 

 gos are unworthy the name, for they 

 are from worthless seedling trees and are 

 little more than juicy balls of fibers sat- 

 urated in turpentine, while the oriental 

 mango is a fruit fit to set before a king. 

 It is in fact more richly flavored than a 

 peach and has no more fiber. The trees 

 grow on poor soil and attain an extreme 

 old age. They bear enormous crops of 

 fruit, that make the trees look when in 

 full bearing as though they were cov- 

 ered with a mass of gold. 



The first introduction of the East 

 Indian Mulgoba mango was made into 

 Florida by the Office of Pomology in 

 1889. From the one tree of this early 

 introduction which survived the freeze 

 of 1895 has come the new mango craze 

 that is now at its height among the 

 Florida planters who have suitable soil 

 and no frosts or only slight ones. When 

 this tree, saved from destruction by 

 Prof. Elbridge Gale, of Mangonia, came 

 into fruit it was a revelation to Amer- 

 ica, to the Western Tropics in fact. 

 From this one tree thousands of grafted 

 trees are now growing in Florida, and 

 it will not be long before the mulgoba 

 is for sale on our markets. To meet 

 the demand for the best mangoes in the 

 world, the office has brought young 

 plants of the best varieties from every 

 region where they are grown, and there 



