FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
189 
tion by saying “no.” I believe that a 
few trees may be planted for home use 
on certain soils, but for anyone to go in¬ 
to it commercially pretty well down the 
State, I could not advise. 
Mr. Goodwin: I would like to ask a 
question about the pawpaw. How can 
you propagate it? Is it necessary to 
graft it? Can it be grown from the 
seed ? 
Mr. Hume: It is being successfully 
grafted. I have seen the plants, and 
have them. The seeds can be planted in 
January and grown for a time, then 
grafted, and in March or April they are 
ready to set out and you can have fruit 
from them that summer. 
In the pawpaw there are flowers of two 
sexes; the pollen-bearing and the pistil¬ 
late. That is one of the difficulties with 
the seedling trees; you don’t know when 
they are young, whether they will bear 
fruit or not. By budding and grafting 
the trees, you are sure of getting bear¬ 
ing trees. In going back to the parent 
plant you can get just what you start 
with; with the seedlings you are guess¬ 
ing. And it has been successfully done. 
I have a letter from Mr. White, of 
Hawaii, in which he touches upon certain 
lines of this work being done in Hawaii. 
Mr. Goodwin : I have three distinct 
plants, all grown from the same fruit. 
One bears the fruit on the trunk; the oth¬ 
er on a long stem. 
Mr. Hume: That is a perfect flower¬ 
ed specimen; the ones where the fruit is 
grown close to the trunk are pistillate, as 
a rule. 
Now, then, we have another one that 
has these long flowers that never bears 
any fruit. It is staminate only. They 
are working it out in Hawaii, getting a 
self-pollinating strain with the stamens 
and pistil in the same flowers. 
A Member: Can you bud on seedlings, 
of any knd, so that they will come true? 
Mr. Hume: Yes; that makes no dif¬ 
ference. 
Professor Rolfs: I wish you learned 
people would not call it pawpaw. Call 
it papaya, as they do nearly all over the 
world. 
We have several trees or plants at Mi¬ 
ami that had still another sexual strain 
than the ones Professor Hume mention¬ 
ed, and that is a perfect flower and the 
fruit borne near the central axis. Un¬ 
fortunately, the fruit was not very de¬ 
licious, so we discarded it on that ground, 
but that plant went so far that in some 
cases the anthers were borne right on the 
corolla. It was very easily possible to 
pollinate it from its own pollen. 
We should not use the seedlings, but 
use the tree of a known variety, and the 
way to get your buds from that is simp¬ 
ly to top your tree. Cut the top out and 
you will have some hundreds of the buds 
to come out, and they graft very easily. 
I did the first by inarching, but we found 
afterwards it can be done by the clum¬ 
siest kind of grafting. The grafting is 
really more simple than budding. 
Mr. Gillette: Can any of those plants 
be secured? 
Professor Rolfs: You may be able to 
get the buds of good varieties from Mr. 
Simmons, but whether you can get them 
or not, I don’t know. They have so small 
an appropriation to work with. 
Mr. Hume: I think you might be able 
