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FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
is eaten by any Chinaman who can get 
it. You can get it here dried, but that 
does not give you any idea of what the 
fruit really is. 
It is in size like a very large straw¬ 
berry and on the outside is not unlike 
a strawberry—of the strawberry color. 
That is peeled off and you get a mass 
of pulp enclosing a small seed, and that 
pulp is indescribable in its delicious 
flavor. 
It is eaten by more people than any 
other on the face of the earth. The 
four hundred million people of China 
eat it, the teeming millions of India eat 
it. the people of the Malay Archipelago 
eat it, and I have no doubt, from the 
experiments that are being conducted, 
that we will eat it, eventually. 
The government undertook some 
years ago, to introduce the Lichee. Mr. 
Taylor does not believe me when I tell 
him Mr. Fairchild of the Plant Industry 
Bureau was the first enthusiast to in¬ 
troduce it. They brought a good many 
plants and endeavored to develop them 
in California and Florida. I believe in 
California they are nearly all dead. 
There are only seventeen out of about 
one hundred plants, now living. Of 
these Lichee plants, Tampa is the proud 
possessor of nearly half of them. Mr. 
Taylor has three on his place on Ne¬ 
braska avenue. I have one much larg¬ 
er than his, but it has not bloomed yet. 
Mr. Reasoner has five, and five and four 
are nine, of the seventeen living in 
America, growing right here in Tampa. 
The great difficulty seems to have 
been in the propogation of the plant. It 
cannot be grown from the seed. The 
government experiments seem to indi¬ 
cate that they cannot bring the fresh 
fruit as far as the station at Washing¬ 
ton and plant it and make it germinate. 
All kinds of efforts have been made to 
secure its growth by budding it upon 
other stocks. It seems to grow by bud¬ 
ding upon a longan. The first tree in 
Florida was introduced by Mr. Reason¬ 
er and was budded on the longan. Mr. 
Taylor at his place here has planted a 
number of longans and hopes to succeed 
in budding. 
During* my visit to China some years 
ago, I had a special commission from 
Mr. Fairchild to investigate the prop¬ 
agation of the Lichee. He wanted to 
send me over there for no other pur¬ 
pose but to find some means by which 
he might succeed in propagating it. I 
had letters to all the experiment sta¬ 
tions where it is grown, but they told 
me over there we would have to get it 
by the means of the system they use in 
China. They simply wrap a ball of clay 
around a limb and allow the limb to 
send out rootlets in the ball of clay and 
then cut it off. 
Whatever the Chinamen can do, I 
am confident we can do. You go up 
from Hong Kong and other Chinese 
cities, and so far as you can see on each 
side of the river are groves of Lichee. 
Now, if the Chinamen can raise Lichee 
by the hundreds of thousands, we can 
raise them. 
As to its adaptation to our climate 
and soil. My Lichee is surrounded by 
mangoes and avocados and other tender 
fruit. In November, there was cold 
enough to knock the leaves off most of 
