CREATING A NEW FRUIT 
ANNA D. WHITE 
With Selected Native Types of Blueberry and Experimental Crossing, Establishing a 
New Industry Which Insures Berries of Superlative Size and Flavor for Garden Use 
Blueberry has been tamed! The task was not 
ITS s? aneasyone. For the Blueberry has inherent objections 
p gfclfl to garden conventionalities. It is a plant of uncom- 
promising character, insistent upon its own conditions 
of growth, to which the grower, if he wishes success, must con- 
form. Nevertheless, a few patient gardeners have concluded 
that it pays to humor this capricious berry. 
When in some New York hotel, of an August morning, the 
waiter, with a flourish, sets before you a saucer of lustrous, blue- 
black berries, some of them as large as Concord Grapes, and on 
tasting them you find the flesh firm, practically seedless, sweet 
with an incomparably delicious flavor, you may know that this 
is no common wild fruit gathered in a tin pail from a jungle of 
underbrush. You are safe in visualizing neat rows of evenly 
spaced bushes, their roots plunged deep into the peaty sand of 
the New Jersey pine district, their crowns blessed by the un- 
broken radiance of a New Jersey sky. Nearby, fringed with 
Calopogon, Sun-dew, Pitcher-plants, and Ferns, flows a cedar- 
brown stream. The color of the water comes, not as popularly 
supposed, from the roots of the swamp Cedar, but is dissolved 
from the earth by the acid reaction of the humus which is in 
the soil. Acid quality of soil is the first demand of the Blueberry. 
The stream is confined in an artificial ditch, fed from a lake- 
like reservoir that gleams at a distance with white Water-lilies. 
The sand in which the Blueberries are set is cool and moist 
below; though on the surface dry and hot enough in the scorch- 
ing July sun. Sand loose and moist is also an imperative con- 
dition of successful Blueberry culture. 
In every direction you may see Cranberry bogs with their 
thick, springy mattresses of creeping vines, and beyond, against 
the sky, the picturesque outlines of the scrub of the misnamed 
New Jersey “barrens.” 
This twenty-acre field of your imagination is, in fact, a reality. 
Near New Lisbon, in Burlington County, New Jersey, where 
cranberries are produced by the fifty 
thousand bushels a year, the pioneer blue- 
berry grower, Miss Elizabeth C. White, is 
developing a new industry. For nine 
years she has been experimenting with 
the High-bush Swamp Blue, or Huckle- 
berry (Vaccinium corymbosum). 
Any one who has wandered over New 
England hills or through the swamps of 
New Jersey and the Pennsylvania Po- 
conos, has noticed the wide variation in 
size, flavor and color on different bushes 
of this species. It naturally occurs to the 
horticulturist that by selection and breed- 
ing the most desirable characteristics may 
be developed and permanently fixed in 
commercially valuable strains. So far, so 
good — but the difficulty commences when 
the ambitious grower tries to subject the 
capricious Blueberry to the ordinary re- 
straints of cultivation. As dozens of dis- 
appointed gardeners can testify, it will 
not grow in an ordinary garden with ordi- 
nary treatment. Miss White approached 
the Blueberry problem from the root, 
instead of the fruit, end. The way had 
already been pointed for her by Mr. 
Frederick V. Coville in a publication of 
the United States Department of Agri- 
culture, “Experiments in Blueberry Cul- 
ture,” wherein are laid down three pri- 
mary facts: 
(i) Blueberries must grow in acid soil. 
Alkaline or limey soils stand at the op- 
posite end of the scale; ordinary garden 
loam in which Clover flourishes easily, 
lying midway between the two extremes. 
Acid soils have a distinct flora all their 
own, the many species of the Heath 
family, including Blueberries, Laurels, and 
Rhododendrons, being very characteristic. 
The explanation of this, as of some other 
peculiar phenomena in the vegetable king- 
dom, lies with microscopic fungi which live 
on the roots, and, themselves necessary to 
© Joseph J. White, Inc., 1920 
HERE IT IS— JUST LIFE SIZE! 
This new Blueberry, product of the crossing of two carefully selected wild varieties, 
is certainly a marketable prize and an attractive possibility for any garden 
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