New Fruit Varieties for Your Garden — b 7 j. r. Mattem, 



Mary- 

 land 



[Editor's Note. — New fruits become distributed so slowly thai 

 public they are hardly to be called ''new." Therefore, these notes 

 in fruits are naturally tried out sparingly because of the invest- 

 day are the standards of to-day. Hence the necessity of 



LATELY an interesting lot of 

 promising new sorts of nearly 

 all the fruits have loomed above 

 the horizon, and, merely as 

 something new, these varieties are worth 

 looking into. Even without the chances 

 of their outclassing old reliable standard 

 sorts, some of them are worth planting 

 because they will fill vacancies in the ripen- 

 ing calendar or in the desired list of colors 

 and flavors. 



One of the new varieties is an everbearing 

 apple, following after the everbearing 

 Raspberry St. Regis, and the Fall-bearing 

 Strawberries. This everbearing feature or 

 ripening of fruit continuously from later 

 spring till fall, is one of the most marked 

 tendencies to be noticed in recent intro- 

 ductions. Other features noticeable are 

 the increasing elimination of the varieties 

 that are low in quality. Such sorts are 

 getting closer and closer to oblivion all the 

 time because the high quality varieties are 

 selected and planted almost exclusively 

 by those who know varieties, and it is al- 

 most safe to say that in another generation 

 sorts of the Ben Davis and Missouri Pippin 

 apple types, and even of the Baldwin and 

 York Imperial will be relegated far into 

 the background, if they are not dropped 

 entirely from cultivation as far as new 

 planting is concerned. 



Very old varieties — grandfathers with 

 histories of general planting in this coun- 

 try running back two hundred years — are 

 such hoary sorts as (to use the apple varie- 

 ties again as illustrations), Fameuse, Lady, 

 Roxbury Russet, Rhode Island Greening, 

 Baldwin, the Newtons, green and yellow, 

 Winter Pearmain and Yellow Bellflower. 

 Mere fathers compared with these are those 

 that would go in the one century class — 

 among others Williams, Early Harvest, 

 Duchess, Sweet Bough, Spitzenburg, Grimes 

 Golden, Hubbardson, Jonathan, Peck's 

 Pleasant and Red Canada apples. 



The "age" of such apple varieties as Stay- 

 man and Delicious, which are now sweeping 

 both the commercial orchard and the home 

 garden field, is thirty to forty years, though 

 only during the last ten or fifteen years 

 have they been planted on a large scale and 



Magic Gem a new heavy yielding strawberry from Idaho 



Joy blackberry has proved to be a good bearer in the 

 eastern states and a hardy plant too 



given a country-wide acceptance among 

 planters. A few of the berry varieties are 

 almost as old as the old apple sorts. This 

 same statement can be applied to pears, 

 but our best peaches, plums (in America), 

 and grapes are newer developments. 



For more than an hour not long ago I 

 sat at a desk in Washington and copied 

 down names of new varieties from the files 

 of a man connected with the American 

 Pomological Society. They were new va- 

 rieties the names of which had been sub- 

 mitted to the Society for approval and 

 registry. For more than an hour I wrote, 

 putting down no descriptions, just the 

 mere names. As a result I have from that 

 list the names of a hundred and thirty-nine 

 brand new varieties of apples, peaches, 

 pears, blackberries, raspberries, grapes, 

 plums and cherries, every one of them 

 backed by an enthusiastic report from 

 somewhere, and every one asking for a 

 "place in the sun." 



With an army such as this invading the 

 field, it would look at first glance as though 

 all our old sorts would have to retire. But 

 this is not the case. The new varieties 

 of fruits nearly always are seedlings from 

 old standard sorts of recognized value. 

 In the original seedling, or maybe in the 

 entire original neighborhood, they show 

 markedly different features from their 

 parents or supposed parents. Yet only 

 once in ten times are they superior, on 

 careful investigation, to the parents, while 

 only once in a hundred times can they hold 

 their .differing qualities. When buds or 

 grafts are taken from them and made to 

 grow under other conditions of food and at- 

 mosphere — in another location — the differ- 



82 



by the time they are fairly well known and recognized by the 

 will be leading many readers into an unknown field. Novelties 

 ment of time and space involved. But the new things of yestcr- 

 being on the lookout for novelties that open up new possibilities.} 



ing features are lost, and the new variety 

 reverts to the original or parent one with- 

 out a change. 



Out of the chaos of named seedlings and 

 out of the ruck of those that really have 

 unique and valuable features, now and then 

 comes a prize of great value — a Delicious 

 or Stayman or Mcintosh apple, a Ray or 

 Mayflower peach, a Senator Dunlop straw- 

 berry or a Bartlett pear. The most care- 

 ful nurserymen try to eliminate the sorts 

 that are not up to a proper standard before 

 they offer any new varieties for sale. 

 They test the new sorts by fruiting them 

 for several years, not only at their home 

 grounds, but in widely separated parts of 

 the country. Both fruit and tree character- 

 istics must be right. 



With all the restrictions in mind, only 

 sixty-five sorts all told will be recommended 

 at this time for your garden. Some of 

 these have been tested fully, and you will 

 find them to be jewels. Others among the 

 sixty-five have not been tried so extensively, 

 but they promise well where they have been 

 tried, and in your garden you may find 

 them to be just as valuable as the proved 

 sorts. In the following descriptions the 

 idea will be to present the outstanding 

 features of the varieties, and to give you 

 the "inside facts" about them, rather than 

 to make complete catalog descriptions. 



New varieties of apples that are recom- 

 mended are these: 



Arthur 



Starr 



Henry Clay 



Starkey 



Anis Rose 



McCroskey 



Mexico 



Wilson's Red June 



Nasseau 



Montgomery 



Winter Banana 



McLellan 



Cornell 



Windsor 



Hilaire 



Arctic 



Sekula 



Golden Medal 



Adirondack 



Liveland Raspberry 



Belmont 



Opalescent 



Norton Red 



Bethel 



Winter Banana, Bethel and one or two 

 others are not, strictly speaking, new sorts. 

 They have been in sight for many years. 

 But they are not by any means planted as 

 widely as they should be, and we should 

 not begrudge them this lift toward the 

 high position they are entitled to by their 

 merits. Norton Red, Arctic, Anis Rose, 

 Adirondack, Bethel, Arthur, 

 Sekula and Windsor apparently 



Premier, an extra early strawberry of high flavor 



