214 
Mississippi—Herba Spagna and Southern Grasses, 
some shrewd Yankee a $5 bill to tell them 
in what time of the moon to cut Canada 
thistles ! Notwithstanding I have the advan¬ 
tage of many of my neighbors, in travelling 
and visiting farms and farmers, and seeing 
what is elsewhere done, yet the information 
brought me at my own house by the valuable 
periodicals of the day is worth to me twenty 
times their cost : how much more valuable 
then must they be to those who can neither 
afford the time or expense of travel! For it 
will hardly be claimed by any, the most con¬ 
ceited, that they “know it all” and have 
nothing more to learn. Even should they 
claim the superiority of practice over theory, 
the experience of a whole community must far 
exceed that of any single individual ; and it 
is this very practice and experience that we 
find offered to our consideration in these 
valuable agricultural papers. 
Dr. Cartwright will accept our thanks for the very 
interesting and scientific letter which follows. The first 
portion of it is purely agricultural, and the latter part 
of it is so instructive for such as wish to make a per¬ 
manent change of location to obviate hereditary pre¬ 
disposition to pulmonary affections, that we deem it 
entirely proper to insert the letter entire in our agri¬ 
cultural paper. 
For the American Agriculturist. 
Mississippi—its Products, Soil, and Climate. 
Natches, Sept. 1, 1842. 
Gent. —The Herba Spagna, or Italian clover, I met 
with, in May 1837, on the margin of the Adriatic sea. 
It was growing in irrigated fields, and also in the re¬ 
claimed soil of what had formerly been salt marshes. 
The tide water is kept off” by embankments, and the 
surface, which was formerly overflowed by the tides, 
is intersected with numerous ditches. The land, thus 
reclaimed, is in checkers or plats of about an acre each. 
I observed that the ditches, separating the plats, were 
nearly full of water. The soil, thus reclaimed by 
ditches and embankments, was covered with a most 
luxuriant growth of Herba Spagna, standing thicker 
than clover or wheat, and nearly waist high in May. 
It differs from the Lucerne I saw growing in France, 
and other countries, about as much as red clover dif¬ 
fers from white. It resembles Lucerne so much as to 
induce me to class it as a species or variety of that 
plant. The inhabitants on the Adriatic told me that 
they cut it nearly every month in the year—that it 
yields more hay than any other grass—that cattle and 
horses are much fonder of it than clover—that cows 
fed upon it give more milk and of a richer quality 
than when fed on any other kind of food. The plant 
I .observed, had a tap root from one to two feet in 
length, running straight down into the earth. It de¬ 
lights in a rich, loose, moist soil. It requires three 
years from the seed to come to perfection, improving 
until eight years old and living twenty years. It is 
sown broadcast, but will yield more in drills. The 
Italians call it Herba Spagna. At Padua, I procured 
some of the seed, and in March 1838, sowed them on 
a lot of ground in Natches, which had been in Bermu¬ 
da grass. The surface, after sowing, was lightly 
sprinkled with ary manure, which soon brought up the 
seed. The young plants grew finely. Many weeds 
soon grew up among them. As it would have been 
too much labor to pull the weeds up, I had both weeds 
and Herba Spagna mowed close to the ground. The 
mowing was repeated monthly. I was glad to find 
after every mowing, my Herba Spagna outgrow the 
weeds, and finally smothered them. The crop of hay 
it afforded the first year, was inconsiderable. But the 
next year, 1839, it yielded an astonishing quantity. 
About the latter part of February, it was knee high, 
and was mowed. It continued to yield a crop of hay 
every month until the dry hot weather set in, which 
put a temporary stop to its growth, the soil being too 
high and dry for it in such weather. In wet weather 
it would grow nearly a waist high in a month. My 
horses and cattle would leave any other kind of food, 
for the Herba Spagna hay, either green or dry. By 
the third year, 1840, the roots had penetrated the soil 
to the depth of 18 inches or 2 feet, and it promised to 
do even better than it had done, and continued to do so, 
until a long spell of dry weather in July and August. 
I spent this summer abroad. On my return I found that 
the Bermuda grass, which is favored by dry hot 
weather, had come up very thickly among the Herba 
Spagna, twisted itself around the neck of the root and 
killed a good part of it. In 1841, the Bermuda grass 
entirely killed it while I was again absent. 
I spent two summers with my family at Biloxi, on the 
sea coast of Mississippi, for health. I observed on the 
margins of the various bays and bayous, which indent 
the Mississippi sea coast, a large quantity of land, 
similar in every respect, except in its unimproved con¬ 
dition, to the kind of land on which I had seen the 
Herba Spagna so luxuriantly growing in Italy. The 
land, at high tide, is partially inundated and requires 
nothing but embankments and ditches to make it a? 
valuable as similar lands on the Adriatic. Embank¬ 
ments, some three or four feet in height, with ditchea 
and locks to let the rain water off 1 , would reclaim 
thousands and tens of thousands of acres on our gull 
coast. As the soil of these unreclaimed low lands is a 
rich black loam, I have no doubt but that the Her¬ 
ba Spagna would grow finely upon it if reclaimed. 
It would also grow upon the higher hommoc land of 
that vicinity. Whether it would flourish in the sandy 
pine lands of the sea coast counties and the interior of 
Mississippi, is questionable, but worthy of a fair ex¬ 
periment. 
The long, dry, and hot weather in this latitude kills 
nearly every kind of valuable grass except the Ber¬ 
muda. The latter grass will not grow in the shade, 
and is apt to be choked by weeds and briers. The sea 
coast counties 'and the pine woods of Mississippi, are 
almost uninhabited, mainly for the want of grass to 
make hay. The lands, except on the margin of brooks 
and rivers, are too poor to make a sufficiency of Indian 
corn to supply the purposes of hay. Even on our best 
lands, all our experiments with the perennial fibrous 
rooted plants have been a failure. Timothy, orchard, 
herd, and blue grass, as well as red clover and the 
Italian rye grass, flourish well enough until our dry 
hot season of the year, when they are apt to die. Even 
when sowed in low ground and protected from the sun 
they cannot, in general, endure the heat and drought 
of our summers. A wet season they promise to do 
well, but a dry season kills them. Thus will it ever 
be with the perennial fibrous rooted plants. The grass¬ 
es so valuable in higher latitudes, mostly have such 
roots. The Herba Spagna, however, has a root en¬ 
tirely different, being a long fusiform root, extending 
at least a foot deeper than any of the fibrous rooted 
grasses. The tap rooted plants, the creepers of nearly 
all kinds, and the repent plants, as the Bermuda grass, 
the strawberry, sweet potatoe, &c., flourish better 
