10 
rose color, cover the leafless branches from end to end and are more 
fragrant than those of any other Cherry in the collection. Another 
Cherry which should find a place in collections for the beauty of its dark 
lustrous birchlike bark is Prunus serrula thibetica, an inhabitant of 
the forests which cover the high mountains of the Chinese Thibetan 
border. It has a low, broad, round-topped head with a trunk unusually 
large for the height of the tree. This tree has not yet flowered in 
the Arboretum. Prunus Dielsiana, in habit and color of its bark, re¬ 
sembles the European Prunus avium, but the flowers are slightly 
larger and sometimes faintly tinged with pink. Prunus pilosiuscula 
is a tree of medium size and is chiefly valuable for the earliness of its 
flowers which open with those of P. concinna and P. tomentosa; they 
appear before the leaves and are pink, and solitary or in small two- or 
three-flowered short-stalked clusters. 
New Chinese Pear-trees. Among the Pear-trees raised from seeds 
collected by Wilson in western China Pyrus Calleryana has created the 
most interest among American pomologists who now believe that they 
have in it a stock on which to graft the garden Pears more resistant 
to blight than any that has yet been tried; and the seeds now pro¬ 
duced in large quantities by the trees in the Arboretum are sought by 
the Department of Agriculture of the United States and by nursery¬ 
men who are anxious to provide the country with a possible remedy 
for the disease which has destroyed many American Pear-orchards. 
The new Chinese Pears have grown even more rapidly than the Chinese 
Cherries, and among them are beautiful clean-stemmed specimens from 
seventeen to twenty feet high, only twelve years old from the seed, 
and now giving every promise of reaching the height of fifty feet 
which these trees often attain on their native mountain sides. P. Cal¬ 
leryana is a shapely pyramidal tree more compact in habit than the 
other Chinese species. The flowers are smaller, and the globose brown 
fruit is hardly more than a third of an inch in diameter. To students 
of cultivated fruits Pyrus serotina, another of Wilson’s introductions, 
is of particular interest, for this tree of the mountain forests of west¬ 
ern China is now believed to be the origin of the brown or yellowish, 
round, hard and gritty Sand Pears which in many varieties the Japan¬ 
ese have cultivated from time immemorial and which must have been 
introduced into Japan probably by the way of Korea. In the early 
days of western intercourse with Japan many varieties of the Sand 
Pear were brought to the United States and Europe, but except for 
the beauty of their flowers and fruits they have proved to be of little 
value, for the fruit is so hard and so full of grit that it is not even 
worth cooking. It was probably forms of the Sand Pear crossed with 
one of the cultivated garden Pears which produced the Leconte and 
Keiffer Pears from which much was at one time expected in this coun¬ 
try, especially in the southern states, but which have proved so sus¬ 
ceptible to blight that the cultivation of these trees has been now 
largely abandoned. The flowers of Pyrus serotina are larger than those 
of P. Calleryana, but there is little beauty in their small brown fruit; 
and the habit of the tree with its long spreading branches forming an 
