The Evolution of American Fruit Growing, L— By Wilhelm Miller, 



TWO CENTURIES AND MANY THOUSAND DOLLARS WASTED ON A FALSE START — THE GOAL WE NOW AIM 

 AT— HOW TO SAVE HEART-BREAKING DISAPPOINTMENT AND ADD MILLIONS TO THE NATIONAL WEALTH 



New 

 York 



TF GEORGE WASHINGTON could 

 *- have invited Professor Bailey to share 

 his inauguration dinner in 1789, it is prob- 

 able that our first president could not have 

 offered our greatest horticulturist a single 

 variety of fruit which is in common cultiva- 

 tion to-day ! And it is possible that Professor 

 Bailey could have uttered a prophecy 

 about American fruit-growing which might 

 have added millions of dollars to the national 

 wealth, saved nearly have a century of 

 wasted effort, and made all the difference 

 between happiness and misery in the lives 

 of thousands of families. 



For, in the first place, nearly all the 

 varieties of fruit then cultivated were of 

 European origin, while at the present time 

 80 per cent., or more, are of American origin. 

 George Washington could not possibly have 

 tasted a good American grape, for the first 

 good one, the Catawba, was not dis- 

 covered until 1802. Practically all our 

 small fruits, save the currant, have been 

 developed from American species since the 

 death of George Washington. And even 

 the tree fruits, which are mostly species of 

 foreign origin, we cultivate more and more 

 in the form of American varieties. 



In the second place, a philosophical 

 scientist, like Bailey or De Candolle, might 

 have warned Americans against European 

 fruits and stimulated them to raising new 

 varieties of our native species. Of course, 

 all the immigrants knew that the American 

 climate is different from the European, and 

 they must have noticed that practically all 

 the trees, shrubs and wild flowers are dif- 

 ferent from the corresponding kinds in 

 Europe. But only a scientist with a trained 

 imagination could have reached the con- 

 clusion that the difference in flora is largely 

 due to the difference in climate, and con- 

 sequently the chances of permanent success 

 with any European species in America are 

 very small. Looking backward, this may not 

 seem a great feat of reasoning power, but 

 even a Bailey or De Candolle might not have 

 been equal to such a flight in 1789, for 

 Darwin's "Origin of Species" was not pub- 

 lished until 1859. 



If Washington could have come back a 

 century after his inauguration, he would have 

 been astonished to find America leading the 

 world in commercial fruit growing. A hun- 

 dred years is a short time for such an accom- 

 plishment and we may take a certain honest 

 pride therein. But it is sickening to learn 

 that we have made this marvellous progress 

 largely in spite of ourselves. In nearly ever)' 

 case the improvement of our native fruits 

 has come from necessity and not from the 

 design of man. And throughout the whole 

 process Americans have been singularly 

 blind to the evolution that has been taking 

 place before their very eyes. 



For instance, we now know that it is 



impractical to raise European grapes out- 

 doors in the East or South. That fact 

 should have been recognized by 1789. Yet 

 it was after that the greatest effort to make 

 America a wine-drinking country was made. 

 A Swiss colony of vineyardists led by Dufour 

 settled at Vevay, Indiana, and made a great 

 experiment which was a total failure. The 

 only grape that succeeded there was one 

 called the Cape, which we now know was a 

 variety of Vitis Labrusca, our wild fox grape. 

 Yet Dufour indignantly repudiated the idea 

 of its being American, considering that its 

 character had been slandered. So, too, with 

 the Catawba, which gave the first great 

 impulse to grape growing in America. His- 

 tory tells us that it was found growing wild 

 near Asheville, N. C, in 1802, and its botan- 

 ical characters are clearly those of the fox 

 grape, yet a German priest, who was misled 

 by the vinous flavor of the fruit, pronounced 

 it the "true Tokay" and the Catawba was 

 therefore disseminated under the name of 

 that famous European variety. Thus in 

 the 'thirties, while the Catawba was driving 

 out the European vines, the grape-growers 

 were making a most determined opposition 

 to native grapes. They wished America 

 to be a wine-producing country and they 

 favored the Catawba because it made good 

 wine. This was natural because the 

 European grape is primarily for wine. But 

 these men never foresaw that American 

 grapes would be valued primarily for eating 

 out of hand. 



Not only have the fruit growers fought 

 against an inevitable evolution, but even the 



Catawba, the first important native grape. About 

 1830 it began to displace European grapes, which 

 cannot be grown commercially East or South 



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botanists have failed to see that the fruit 

 growers were unconsciously using species 

 new to science. The most important of all 

 raspberries, the purple canes, went without 

 a scientific name until 1869 when Peck 

 called them Rubus neglectus. Most people 

 supposed our garden strawberries to be of 

 European origin until 1896, when Bailey 

 proved that they came from the Chilean 

 strawberry, which is native to our Pacific 

 Coast. No one understood that immense 

 group of Southern plums of which Wildgoose 

 and Miner are famous examples until 1896, 

 when Bailey explained them as a group of 

 natural hybrids between Primus Americana 

 and angustifolia and gave them the name of 

 Primus Jwrtulana. In short, we had no 

 clear conception of the botanical relationship 

 of American fruits until the last decade of 

 the nineteenth century, when T. V. Mun- 

 son's grape discoveries ripened and Bailey 

 published his "Evolution of Our Native 

 Fruits." 



We may take an honest pride in the fact 

 that our country was the first in the tem- 

 perate zone to make it possible for the poor 

 to enjoy a variety of fruit the year round. 

 But when we get "chesty" about the vast 

 fortunes represented by American fruit grow- 

 ing, it will do us good to know that American 

 pomology has rested until lately upon a most 

 precarious basis and that we have not been 

 very hospitable to new ideas. 



Eor example, there was no wholesale way 

 of destroying insects or preventing diseases 

 until the discovery of spraying. Yet the 

 potato beetle, which proved that we must 

 have such a weapon, began its alarming career 

 as early as i860. For thousands of years 

 apples have been wormy, yet Americans did 

 not begin spraying against insects until 1878, 

 and even then it was not against the codlin 

 moth, but the canker worm. There was no 

 wholesale preventive of plant diseases until 

 1883, when the Bordeaux mixture was first 

 applied in a systematic, experimental way 

 in France. And spraying did not become 

 a general practice in the United States until 

 1895. Yet we now consider spraying as 

 one of the four fundamentals in pomology 

 coordinate with tilling, feeding and pruning. 

 The wonder is how American fruit growing 

 ever survived the onslaught of foreign pests, 

 culminating in the San Jose scale. 



Again, the grape has been cultivated for 

 over 4,000 years, yet the self-sterility of 

 fruits in general was scarcely suspected until 

 the 'eighties, and it was nearly 1900 before 

 we had a fair working list of all the self- 

 sterile fruits. Here is another fundamental 

 fact, for many varieties will not bear fruit at 

 all unless they are planted near other varieties 

 that bloom at the same time and have the 

 power to fertilize them. Surely, somebody 

 with a little imagination might have sus- 

 pected something of the kind in the middle 



