No doubt, however, orchard-planting as a general practice was long delayed in New York because of political and economic conditions. The Dutch came to America as traders and not as home-makers, and almost from the day they landed were in trouble with both their savage and their civilized neighbors so that actual or petty warfare prevented them from planting orchards until in 1647 when the reins of government were taken in hand by Peter Stuyvesant, a farmer as well as a soldier, who at once set about encouraging the planting of fields, gardens and orchards. He brought, we are told, fruits, flowers, farm and truck-crops from the neighboring colonies and Holland and these he not only planted on Manhattan Island but sent to the settlements up the Hudson. The peach may readily be grown in suitable soils from Albany down the river to New York, and, by the end of the Seventeenth Century, we are told by travelers, naturalists and missionaries that this fruit was in common cultivation by the whites and was even rudely tilled by the Indians of the Hudson Valley.
But, in eastern New York, away from the coast, the peach did not find the climate as congenial as in the colonies to the south and then, too, from the following record, the peach-borer early became troublesome. Kalm says:127 "Peach-trees have often been planted here (Albany, New York) and never would succeed well. This was attributed to a worm which lives in the ground, and eats through the root, so that the tree dies. Perhaps the severity of the winter contributes much to it." We have another reference to show that winter-killing must have been a discouraging factor in peach-culture in this part of New York in early days as it is now. Cadwallader Colden, appointed first surveyor-general of New York in 1719, and in 1761 lieutenant-governor of the Province, a botanist of note, who had a patent of land in what is now Orange County, wrote in 1737 that cold had killed the peach-trees the previous winter.
The traveler who visits New York today finds many orchards on the Hudson but in them he sees comparatively few peaches. The peach is much more at home two hundred miles west about the Central Lakes and along the shores of Lake Ontario. Here, it is interesting to learn, peaches were grown in considerable quantities long before the region was settled by the whites—how long we have no record nor do we know much of the character of the fruit. John Bartram in his Travels from Pensilvania to Onondago, Oswego and the Lake Ontario, an account of a journey made in 1743, mentions apples, peaches, plums and grapes growing about the Indian villages passed through on his route. Whether these peaches came from the white settlements nearer the Atlantic, or at a much earlier date from the Indians to the South, or both, we cannot even surmise.
Sullivan's army, which came to this region in 1779 to chastise the Indians, found and destroyed considerable numbers of fruit-trees, among them many peaches. After Sullivan's raid the region was quickly settled by whites who, following the examples of the Indians, planted apples and peaches, the orchard soon becoming a prominent asset to every farm. Collections of pioneer papers frequently mention the great adaptability of these lake-regions to peaches. In Conover's History of Kanadasaga and Geneva128 there are sixteen references to the peach-orchards about Seneca and Cayuga lakes in and about the year 1800. As in the South, the products seem to have been used chiefly in making peach-brandy.
David Thomas,129 Aurora, Cayuga County, New York, was the pioneer horticulturist, fruit-grower and nurseryman in this part of the State and soon after coming to New York in 1805, we learn from several references to his orchards and nurseries in his own writings, began planting peaches. All of the named varieties from the South and East were tried in his orchard and if valuable were propagated and sold from his nursery. According to his son, John Jacob Thomas, the pomological writer, he had in 1830 "the most extensive and valuable collection of bearing trees west of the Hudson." Through him the western counties of the State were stocked with named peaches and other fruits.
Of peaches in the New England colonies, we need say but little. Except in favored parts of Connecticut and Massachusetts, this fruit was little grown in these northern colonies. It is not at all probable that New England Indians ever planted peaches and for a generation after the whites came the struggle for the necessities of life kept them from indulging in so great a luxury as a peach-orchard. Strong drink was as commonly used by the Puritans as by the Churchmen in Virginia and peach-brandy would have been as acceptable but it was easier to produce cider, and rum from the West Indies could be had with little trouble. Still, peaches were sparingly grown in the New England colonies.
The Massachusetts Company in 1629 sent peach-pits, along with seeds of other fruits, to be planted by the colonists.130 Twelve years later George Fenwick, Saybrook, Connecticut, writes to Governor Winthrop that he is "prettie well storred with chirrie & peach trees."131 Justice Paul Dudley,132 who seems to have been the leading horticulturist in Massachusetts in his time, writes in 1726: "Our Peaches do rather excel those of England, and then we have not the Trouble or Expence of Walls for them; for our Peach Trees are all Standards, and I have had in my own Garden seven or eight Hundred fine Peaches of the Rare-ripes, growing at a Time on one Tree." From another statement made by Justice Dudley,133 we learn that peaches were still being grown from the stone and may assume that budding was not known or so careful a horticulturist as our author would have mentioned it. He says: "Our Peach Trees are large and fruitful, and bear commonly in three Years from the Stone. I have one in my Garden of twelve Years Growth, that measures two Foot and an Inch in Girt a Yard from the Ground, which, two Years ago, bore me near a Bushel of fine Peaches."
About the close of the Eighteenth Century the planting of pits for permanent trees began to give way to budding. It does not appear who began budding peaches on this side of the Atlantic but the desirability of budded stock was discussed as early as 1736, for in that year we find the English botanist, Peter Collinson, urging his American colleague, John Bartram, to "graft Plums and Nectarines on Peach stocks."134 The matter had evidently been under consideration before for Collinson tells Bartram "Pray try; I have great opinion of its succeeding."135 Bartram is hard to convince and ten years later Collinson is still urging him to bud, for, in a letter of April 26, 1746, he writes, rather impatiently, "Though thou canst not see, yet I have told thee what inoculating a Peach stock may do."136
Probably the Princes, pioneer nurserymen in America, in their nursery at Flushing, Long Island, first began to bud the peach, for in their catalog of 1771 they offer 29 sorts though most of these appear to be types rather than varieties. Twenty years later they list 35 varieties with the statement that all "are inoculated." John Kenrick,137 father of William Kenrick,138 the pomological author, who for years was Prince's chief competitor, his nurseries being located at Newton, Massachusetts, began business in 1790 by planting a quantity of peach-stones the trees from which he did not bud. Four years later, we are told, he learned to bud and greatly extended his assortment of varieties, making a specialty of budded peach-trees.139
Until the middle of the next century, peaches were nevertheless commonly grown from the pits. It is probable that never before nor since, the world over, have seedling peaches been raised on so extended a scale as in America during the half-century following the Revolutionary war. The country between the Atlantic seaboard and the Mississippi was being rapidly settled and on nearly every farm from the Great Lakes to the Gulf, barring a few in the northernmost parts of this great area, peaches were planted. They furnished food not only for the pioneers but were used in fattening pigs and in the earlier part of the period, at any rate, were, with apples, the chief supply of ardent spirits which every farmer then kept on hand for daily use. There were millions of peach-trees in America before 1825 but until that time there were but few named varieties. Then the art of budding began to spread; nurseries sprang up; this vast collection of peaches was passed through the sieve of selection; local varieties quickly acquired fame; and, as means of communication developed, the new varieties began to be disseminated, until, in 1850, American nurseries were selling over 400 varieties, a number which at the close of the century had increased to over 1000.
Peach-growers, in the period under consideration, gave their trees much the same care as is given in the present time except that they did not spray. Pests were fewer and yet some were especially troublesome, notably the peach-borer, the remedies for which were as numerous as today. Curculio, then as now, almost prohibited the culture of nectarines. A rot, the brown-rot, without doubt, did much damage. Peach-yellows, as yet, was not the scourge it now is but, as we shall see, was well in evidence. There were faddists in those days as in these. Thomas Coulter of Bedford County, Pennsylvania, was one of the original "sod-mulchers"—at least year in and year out he inveighed against cultivation. He managed to get himself in all of the publications of the times for a period of a half-century. We find his method discussed in Volume V of the Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, in the Domestic Encyclopaedia140 in 1803 and, as late as 1821, a full account was published in the American Farmer.141 We quote the article in full, as it came out in the three publications named, as a record of the times and because it contains a number of novel ideas some of which may commend themselves to modern orchardists of the sod-mulch school who want a cheap and easy way of growing peaches.
"Transplant your peach-trees, as young as possible, where you mean them to stand; if, in the kernel, so much the better ... because, in that case, there will be no check of growth, which always injures peach-trees. Plant peach-trees 16 feet apart, both ways, except you would wish to take your waggon through the orchard to carry the peaches away; in that case, give 24 feet distance to every fifth row, one way, after transplanting. You may plough and harrow amongst your peach-trees, for two years, paying no regard to wounding or tearing them, so that you do not take them up by the roots. In the month of March, or April, in the third year after transplanting, cut them all off by the ground; plough and harrow amongst them as before, taking special care not to wound or tear them in the smallest degree, letting all the sprouts or scions grow that will grow; cut none away, supposing six or more should come from the old stump; the young scions will grow up to bearing trees on account of the roots being strong. Let no kind of beasts into peach-orchards, hogs excepted, for fear of wounding the trees; as the least wound will greatly injure the tree, by draining away that substance which is the life thereof; although the tree may live many years, the produce is not so great, neither is the fruit so good.
After the old stock is cut away, the third year after transplanting, the sprouts or scions will grow up, all round the old stump, from four to six in number; no more will come to maturity, than the old stump can support and nourish; the remainder will die before ever they bear fruit. These may be cut away, taking care not to wound any part of any stock, or the bark. The sprouts growing all round the old stump, when loaded with fruit will bend and rest on the ground in every direction, without injuring any of them, for many years, all of them being rooted in the ground, as tho' they had been planted. The stocks will remain tough, and the bark smooth for 2 years and upwards; if any of the sprouts or trees from the old stump should happen to split off, or die, cut them away, they will be supplied from the ground, by young trees, so that you will have trees from the same stump for 100 years, as I believe. I now have trees, 36, 20, 10, 5 and down to one year old, all from the same stump.
The young trees coming up, after any of the old trees split off or die, and are cut away, will bear fruit the second year; but this fruit will not ripen so easily as the fruit on the old trees from the same stem. Three years after the trees are cut off by the ground, they will be sufficiently large and bushy, to shade the ground so as to prevent grass of any kind from matting or binding the surface, so as to injure the trees; therefore; ploughing is useless, as well as injurious; useless, because nothing can be raised in the orchard, by reason the trees will shade all the ground, or nearly so; injurious, because either the roots, stocks or branches will be wounded: neither is it necessary ever to manure peach-trees, as manured trees will always produce less and worse fruit, than trees that are not manured; although by manuring your peach-trees, they will grow larger, and look greener and thicker in the boughs, and cause a thicker shade, yet on them will grow very little fruit, and that little will be of a very bad kind generally looking as green as the leaves, even when ripe, and later than those that never have been manured."
None of the varieties that we now grow was then cultivated. Taking the sorts described in 1800 we find that four were red-fleshed; eight, yellow-fleshed; thirty-four, white-fleshed; eighteen, freestones; nineteen, clingstones, and twelve nectarines. There were no flat, or Peento, peaches but a sort known as Venus's Nipple was seemingly a typical beaked peach.
In 1800, Baltimore was the best market for peaches in America and was near the Chesapeake peach-belt. We are fortunate in having a description of peach-growing around Baltimore at about that time. Richard Parkinson, an English farmer and agricultural writer, came to America to rent one of George Washington's farms in 1798. The two could not agree and Parkinson rented a farm near Baltimore on which was a peach-orchard. He published an account of his experiences in two very readable volumes and from this work we quote in part the story of his peach-orchard. Perhaps allowances should be made, for Parkinson seems to have been soured by failure and some of his expressions are such as might be expected from an opinionated Englishman undergoing new experiences in America just after the Revolution. Parkinson says:142
"It would astonish a stranger to see the quantity of fruit in these parts, which makes the country to look beautiful twice a-year, when the trees are in blossom, and when the fruit is on the trees ripe. But the fruit is chiefly for the use of hogs and can be applied to no better purpose.
On my farm at Orange-Hill, only three miles from Baltimore, the last year I was there, I sold all my peaches to two men at four pence per peck, and let them have a cart and a horse to take them into the city to sell, knowing I had only made four pence per peck on the average the year before, and gathered them myself. These men agreed to pick them, and feed the horse in town at their expence. It was the opinion of every one that they had got a great bargain, and many others wished they had had it. They picked about one-half of them, and carried them to Baltimore: but, alas! they gave up the business, saying they could not make wages, although they at first had said that they would certainly take every peach, intending, if the market should not suit, to carry them to the stills, &c. I was in hopes all this exertion would make this bargain successful, as four pence per peck would pay much better than to give them to hogs, as I have no knowledge of what number a hog will eat. Seeing this scheme frustrated, and thinking it a sin and a shame to see such a number of fine peaches rot on the ground, I mounted my horse and rode to the stills, as there were many small ones within three or four miles of me in the country. They have been erected for this use; but many of them are never used after the first year; and I am of the opinion that they will not pay expences. The men at the stills were civil enough; they offered to lend me the still, and let me find a man to work it, &c. or they would work it for me; but, from every information I could obtain, I found that my peaches would not more than pay the carriage to the stills and hardly that; and after selling them to the owners of the stills, they would not give me so much for my fruit, as would pay me for my trouble; nor will peaches pay the farmer, to be given to the hogs, if they be not so situated that the hogs can run where they are; and that happened not to be my case.
As a striking instance of the little profit of stills, Mr. O'Donnel, at Canton, had planted an orchard, of great extent, of red peaches, for the purpose of making peach-brandy. The red peach is reckoned much superior to any other for brandy. Although Mr. O'Donnel's orchard had grown to bear in great perfection and he had a still and the other necessary apparatus, the profit proved so small, that he suffered the whole to go waste, and his pigs consumed the produce; and, in the winter, rooted up all those fine peach trees, and planted the ground with Indian corn, having previously manured the land with dung from Baltimore for the purpose of an orchard. Now this gentleman had some hundreds of acres of woodlands unimproved in this plantation; therefore, the cause could not be for want of land.
My fine turnips, Indian corn, potatoes, &c. were in the field by the orchard without any fence. Indeed hogs are not allowed to run at large within five miles of Baltimore, by an act of assembly; and mine were too valuable to risk such a misfortune; and especially as I was a great hog-shooter myself, it would have been fine diversion for any of my neighbours to have shot one of my fifty-dollar pigs. Seeing that these plants would not succeed, all that remained was to fatten my own hogs with them. I had but seven hogs; and they would have employed a man with horse and cart half a day to feed them; for, after a short time, they will only eat the best peaches, and refuse the others as a man would. I found this plan would not answer; and the consequence was, that, after every trial and exertion, they rotted on the ground. Now my farm was so situated that the great road through the heart of the country went through it, five or six stage-coaches, and great numbers of other carriages of all kinds. In all probability some of my own countrymen as merchants (for there begin to be many of these gentlemen to settle their accounts with the American merchants, and I suppose they will increase) seeing this waste committed, would, on returning to England, relate their story in this way—That when at the tavern at Baltimore on the same day, the fruit-people were asking eleven pence apiece for peaches. An Englishman says to himself, 'What idle fools those Americans are! and I think all the English, when they get to America, are as bad: but, when I get there, I will set them the example.' But when there, he finds himself much disappointed, and does not know how it is that he does not increase in riches, while neither himself nor his family enjoys any comfort. He at last finds out that the Americans are not a set of fools as he once thought: and, as he must have a name for them, perhaps he calls them rogues; which, if Lord Chesterfield was right in his observation, pleases a man the best of the two.
When I took this farm, I had not a doubt, that, by some extraordinary exertion, I should be able to make something handsome from peaches, and so near Baltimore. Before I took the farm, when I enquired how peaches sold in the market, perhaps they would tell me eleven pence apiece, and eleven pence a peck on the same day. That used to stagger me very much: but it is so: and the man who offers you a fine Newington peach for eleven pence or a five-penny bit, sells but few each day; and lives, although very poorly, at a very great expence; consequently his profit must be great on each article. The man who sells the peaches at eleven pence each, will not grow rich by his business, any more than the grower. Then we come to the calculation of my profit at four pence per peck, which is the best and greatest price. Could the scheme be put in execution, it will, generally speaking, require two men and one horse and cart each day, to pick thirty pecks and carry them to market; and thirty pecks are more than any white man can sell one day with another. A black man is much better for this business than a white man; although they are in general ignorant, they are impudent: thirty pecks of peaches, at four pence per peck, is just ten shillings per day for peaches; and the two men's wages are worth, at that season of the year, one dollar per day each, and one pint of whiskey, which will be sixteen shillings for the men: the cart and horse are worth one dollar and a half per day; but you could not hire it for less than two dollars. Now the expences on this business are one pound seven shillings and three pence per day, and the produce is ten shillings. But as I sold them, I made profit each day on thirty pecks of peaches two shillings and nine pence: the reader may plainly see that there could not be any thing done better. This shews in this part of the work where I am on the Eastern Shore, one hundred miles and upwards from market, that the reader will be convinced the cherries and peaches pay the best for hogs."
In the preceding pages our narrative has flitted from continent to continent and country to country in a belt encircling the earth. Few other fruits are found under such varied conditions and over such extended areas. We have seen that peaches are found wild and cultivated over much of Japan; as far north as Vladivostock in Korea; once a wild inhabitant of some part of China it is now cultivated in nearly every section of that vast empire where agriculture is an industry; the trees are so abundant and so much at home in the orchards and forests of the Turkestans and Persia as to have given rise to the belief that they have always grown there. While not so common as in Asia, yet peaches thrive in all of southern Europe and readily submit to artificial culture in pots and on walls in northern European latitudes. Coming to America with the first Spaniards, the peach found such congenial surroundings that it spread rapidly, freely and widely, leading botanists three centuries later to call it a native. In the fruit-areas of the United States, after two centuries of cultivation, though sometimes a luxury and the crop often a speculation, the peach is so perennially plentiful that it is to be found, fresh, canned or evaporated, in every home in the land and the species is represented in American pomologies by over 1000 sorts which have originated in this country.
However, in tracing the history of the peach from China to America, we have not wholly shown the range of adaptability of this fruit. The peach has become adapted to the clear skies, strong light, long seasons and hot climate of northern Africa, where, under modified cultural treatment, it is a common fruit in Egypt143 and the other states bordering on the Mediterranean. It thrives on the islands in the Mediterranean and on those of the North Temperate zone almost to the tropics in the Atlantic and the Pacific, as the Azores, Canaries, West Indies and Hawaiian group. As long ago as 1649 the Azores were famous for peaches and Colonel Norwood, author of A Voyage to Virginia,144 in a gustatory reminiscence tells us that they were of so good quality that he "did not fail to visit and revisit them in the dead of night to satisfy a ravenous appetite nature has too prodigally given me for that species." In the sub-tropic climate of Guadeloupe Islands, French West Indies, there is a peach peculiar to the region differing in shape, flavor and in heat-resisting qualities from the common run of this fruit.145
The Aryan race has taken the peach across the equator in the pathways of discovery, conquest and civilization, and made it a favorite fruit in the gardens and orchards of the South Temperate as well as in those of the North Temperate zone. In the colonies of South Africa the peach seems to be as common as any deciduous fruit, native sorts being planted with those from Europe and America. Of the Transvaal Yellow Peach, R. A. Davis, horticulturist of the colony, says:146 "Generally speaking, it is the fruit most commonly grown in the Transvaal, and it may safely be said that where it will not grow no other peach stands much chance of thriving. The writer has seen them flourishing by the side of the railroad amongst granite boulders, the result of a chance pit thrown from the window of a railway carriage. It is also extensively grown as a hedge around homesteads, having been planted after the primitive method of turning a furrow where the hedge was wanted and simply dropping the seeds in after the plough. It is commonly recognised that the peach hedge should duly appear and bear fruit in two years from planting the seed. The writer has also seen them growing by the side of water-furrows and dams, with the whole of the roots on one side of the tree at least immersed in water."
The Spaniards, no doubt, planted the peach in parts of South America soon after the discovery of the continent and it now runs wild on both coasts. Thus, Darwin in his famous voyage found the islands at the mouth of the Parana River, Argentina, "thickly clothed with peach and orange trees carried there by the waters of the river."147 Many references to wild peaches on the Pacific Coast may be found, as interesting as any being one from Bertero who says that on Robinson Crusoe's island, Juan Fernandez,148 "The peach is so abundant that one can scarcely form an idea of the quantity of fruit that it bears. They are in general of good quality despite the state of wildness." According to Oakenfull,149 in Brazil, "Of all the fruits introduced from abroad, the peach has made itself more at home than any." Wight150 reports the peach and nectarine in Argentina, Chile, Peru and Bolivia under cultivation and as escapes from cultivation in seemingly all degrees of evolution. The peach-drying industry is important in the province of Coquimbo, Chile. According to Lounsbury the peach is the most common fruit-tree in Argentina. He says:151 "It grows almost everywhere most luxuriantly, bears heavily and as yet no very serious insect or fungus pest for it has become widespread. Solid blocks of thousands of trees are not uncommon about Buenos Ayres. Most of the choice varieties of Europe and America have been introduced." The culture of this fruit in South America falls short of that in North America only because of the lack of advancement in horticulture—the one continent is a century behind the other in this field of agriculture.
In temperate Oceanica the peach plays as important a part in horticulture as any other of the deciduous tree-fruits. In early days in New Zealand, "vast groves of peaches existed, sometimes, as in the Waikato, extending for miles, where magnificently grown trees cropped without limit."152 Both the peach and nectarine are grown in the horticultural regions of the island. Wherever the fruits of temperate climates are cultivated in Australia, there may the peach be found. If one may judge from the attention given this fruit in the agricultural literature of New Zealand and Australia, it holds the same high place in the horticulture of these islands in the Pacific that it has in Europe and America.
The types of peaches are almost as diverse as the regions in which the fruit is an inhabitant. The 2181 varieties described in The Peaches of New York attest the variability of the species in America and Europe, many of our sorts having come from the Old World. This great number of kinds can be distinguished by reason of differences in skin, flesh, flavor, aroma, stone and season, the attributes of which have been mentioned several times in foregoing paragraphs. The structure of leaf and tree offers as many more taxonomic characters. It is interesting to note the extreme forms in fruit and tree the peach has taken on in its centuries of world-wide wanderings.
Round, flat, beaked, free or clingstone peaches with smooth or downy skins and red, yellow or white flesh, sweet, sour or bitter, in all combinations, and each often modified by soil and climate, are known to American growers of this fruit. But there are many peaches with less well-known characters. Thus, a peach in China bears fruits as heavy as one pound apiece with extraordinary keeping and shipping qualities;153 another Chinese peach of the Honey type has a tree with a maximum height of only seven or eight feet;154 growing in the same locality, Poliping, China, is a variety with extraordinarily long leaves;155 the Paak wat to peach from China is a white-stoned sort;156 a variety in the French West Indies has fruits that peel easily and withstand a continuous temperature in ripening season of 76 to 90 degrees;157 from Kashgar comes a peach that will keep for several months;158 in Chinese Turkestan there is a nectarine "said to keep for several weeks after fully ripe;"159 even more remarkable is the Feitcheng peach which ripens in late September and can be kept, if wrapped in paper, until February;160 as remarkable as any is the Transvaal Yellow of South Africa which we have seen in a foregoing paragraph grows "amongst granite boulders," "as a hedge around homesteads" and "beside water furrows and dams, the roots of one side of the tree immersed in water;" the Fragrant Peach and the Firm Peach from China are not yet known in America;161 another Chinese peach is a dwarf, "grown in pots indoors, which fruits at a height of fifteen inches and bears peaches on the main trunk though the stem be scarcely larger than a lead pencil."162 Most of the examples named are from China but others can be found in every distinct region in which peaches have long been grown.
Every well-marked geographical region in which the peach is grown comes, sooner or later, to have a type of varieties of its own; yet the universal stamp of the peach—of cultivated Prunus persica—is on them all. These facts imply two important things. First, the peach is an exceedingly flexible fruit, capable of being moulded to fit many conditions of environment; and, under cultivation, training, feeding and culture in unlike regions, soils and climates, may still be greatly improved and the improvements all intensified and augmented by crossing and selecting. Second, the peach, a gift to the world from China, has seemingly, in its centuries of cultivation by the Orientals, taken on sufficient immutability to make it one of the most stable of species, especially in its fruits. The many races and thousands of varieties are all best put in one species; many varieties come true to seed; and peaches from seed seldom "revert" to worthless forms as so many seedling fruits habitually do. Cultivated plants, as all who work with them know, differ widely in variability. Some, as corn, the cucurbits, and grapes and plums with their many species, are so variable as to be almost unmanageable in attempts to improve them; others, as the cereals, are quite too immutable for the best work of the breeder. The peach is neither a stone wall nor shifting sand in the matter of variability.
The genus Prunus is without peer in the number of distinct, natural, esculent products it furnishes man. Here belong the stone-fruits—peaches, plums, cherries, almonds and apricots, represented by some forty edible species, which, through long domestication, have been broken up into not less than 5000 orchard-varieties, of which at least 3000 are now under cultivation. Of the two-score cultivated species of this genus, Prunus persica, the common peach, is easily the most remarkable when judged either by the senses which make foods palatable and pleasant or by the criteria that establish the commercial worth of a product. As virtues which give the peach leading place among stone-fruits, we may specify: Wider distribution and consequently commoner cultivation and a greater number of varieties; larger size, greater beauty, pleasanter and more diversified taste, and more culinary uses than other stone-fruits; and greater productiveness, more rapid growth and earlier fruiting of the trees than most of the species of the genus. The place of the peach in the genus Prunus is thus easily established from a horticultural point of view, but it is a much more difficult matter to make clear its botanical standing among the species with which it is considered botanically related.
The botanical relations of the several stone-fruits to each other have been set forth in the foregoing books of this series on plums and cherries, but, for the convenience of those who may not have these treatises, a summary of the relationships of the species of Prunus is presented. Besides, greater emphasis on several differences between the peach and its congeners is needed. In particular, since some notable naturalists have held that the peach is a modified almond, the differences between these two fruits must be more clearly set forth.
Nearly every botanist who has done much towards classifying plants has grouped the stone-fruits according to a plan of his own and there are, therefore, many classification schemes and consequently a most confused nomenclature for this genus. Happily, the pitfalls in synonomy dug by botanists need not worry horticulturists; for each of the stone-fruits constitutes a distinct horticultural group. In tree or fruit of peach, plum, cherry, apricot, or almond, who could mistake one for another? For horticultural purposes we accept as best one of the oldest and yet one of the most commonly used classifications which places in one genus all of the stone-fruits. What are the lines of cleavage between the several stone-fruits of common cultivation?
Stone-fruits fall naturally into two distinct groups. In the first the leaves are rolled in the buds—convolute. The plums and the apricots belong to this section. In the buds of the other group the leaves are folded lengthwise along the midrib—conduplicate. To this section belong almonds, peaches and cherries. The two sections seem to be united in this matter of disposition of leaves in the bud, it should be said in passing, by a few species of American plums which are conduplicate in vernation. The second section is further subdivided by very marked differences in the fruits. The fruits of the peach and almond are larger than those of the cherry, less juicy,—in the case of the almond almost dry,—hirsute (except in the nectarine), and are borne without stems; and the blossoms usually appear long before the opening of the leaves. Cherry-fruits are always juicy, usually glabrous, and are borne on more or less distinct stems; and the blossoms appear with the leaves. Botanists who put these fruits in one genus usually redivide according to the characters given so that the plum and apricot stand in one sub-genus (Euprunus), the almond and peach in another (Amygdalus), and the cherry in a third (Cerasus).
Differentiating more closely, we find that it is not so easy to distinguish between the peach and the almond. The likenesses are so many and so apparent that it is not to be wondered that Knight, whose theory we have discussed on a foregoing page, came to the conclusion that the peach is a modified almond, or that Darwin, with his belief that plants came sooner or later to express their environmental conditions, should be inclined to believe that the peach is an evolution from the almond. It is easy to imagine that countless ages ago—how long since is but an invitation to argue—the two species merged into one. Offspring of the parent-species once established in distinct soil and climatic conditions—the peach in China, the almond in southwestern Asia—differentiation began and in time each region was represented by a species of its own. Such an occurrence is but one of the commonplaces of evolution; but Knight, Lindley and Darwin thought they saw evidence that the separation came after the almond, the supposed parent-species, had been domesticated, the steps being from fleshy almond to bad clingstone, to good clingstone, to freestone, to nectarine. The arguments against such a descent have been given elsewhere.
The chief differences between the two species are to be found in the matured fruits though, at first thought, it might appear that these are not greater than those found in widely separated varieties of either of the two species. The fruits of the peach and the almond are, however, much more widely separated than any of the varieties of either species, inasmuch as the differences are several and have to do with parts not usually affected by cultivation and not the subject of selection by the cultivator. Thus, the fruit of the peach is a delectable esculent; that of the almond inedible; the flesh of the peach, the mesocarp, is soft, fleshy, juicy; that of the almond thin, tough and leathery; the pit of the peach must be removed while that of the almond drops naturally from the hard flesh which splits at maturity. The differences between the pits of the two species are quite as marked as in the flesh of the fruit. The pit of the peach is deeply sculptured, pitted, and of a bone-like consistency; that of the almond is nearly smooth and in most varieties is much thinner and of softer texture. The differences in the kernels are such as could easily be brought about by selection, some peach-kernels being sweet and edible and some almond-kernels being too bitter to be palatable.
Coming to the tree-characters we find that there are several which differ sufficiently to give each of the two fruits distinct specific rank. The winter aspect of the two trees is wholly different. The almond resembles a young apple tree in color of bark more than it does the peach and has, too, a head much like that of a broad-topped, much-branched apple. In foliage the distant aspect is much the same, but examined closely there are several distinctions that hold in comparing the two species. The leaves of the peach are more broadly lanceolate than those of the almond, coarsely serrate or crenate while the margins of almond-leaves are finely serrate. The glands on the leaf-stalk or leaf of the peach are globose, reniform or mixed; on the almond, the glands are globose. The flowers in the two species are similar but the time of flowering is markedly different. The color of the petals in both varies from pale pink to deep pink with occasional pure white forms; the flowers of true almonds are always large while those of the peach are about equally divided between large and small. The almond, in New York, is out of bloom before flowers of the peach appear, the difference in blooming-time being from one to three weeks.
Fruit-growers must largely depend on printed descriptions for knowledge of varieties. A well-made description of tree or fruit, to one mentally equipped to interpret it, is second only to having the real objects at hand. But the difficulty is that few excepting professional pomologists know the characters of even the common fruits and their relative importance. Before taking up either botanical or horticultural descriptions of peaches, then, it is necessary to direct attention to the characters of the peach, differences in which distinguish species and varieties. Be it remembered in this study of the characters of the peach, however, that, as fields and woods offer better facilities for the botanist than the herbarium, so the peach-orchard is a fitter place to study the characters of the peach than a printed page.
The single species of the peach in which we are greatly interested has a very characteristic tree, the variations in which are, however, less well marked than those of the tree of any other of our common fruits. The peach-tree is distinguished by its low, roundish and never pyramidal head. Of its gross characters, size is most important in distinguishing varieties, the several more or less distinct types in the species usually being separable by size alone. In considering size, proper allowance must, of course, always be made for environment. There are no true dwarfs among the varieties of Prunus persica cultivated in America.
Habit of growth is nearly as important as size of tree in determining varieties. Thus, a variety may be round-topped, upright-spreading or drooping in habit; the head may be open or dense; the branches long or short, stout or slender; the trunks may be short or long, straight or crooked, much branched or little branched. These habits of growth serve not only to distinguish sorts but often determine whether the tree is sufficiently manageable to make a good orchard-plant.
Hardiness is an important character both in classifying and in determining the orchard-value of a variety. All peaches are tender to cold as compared with other tree-fruits of temperate climates but there is sufficient difference in varieties to permit the designations hardy, half-hardy and tender. In the classificatory scheme in most common use in America, that of Onderdonk and Price, variation in hardiness is the chief determinant of groups.
All peaches come in bearing so early and bear so regularly that varietal differences in these characters scarcely count in classifying, but productiveness varies very characteristically in different varieties. Environment and care greatly influence fruitfulness yet, notwithstanding, the quantity of fruit borne is often a means of identifying a variety and, of course, must always be considered by the cultivator and the breeder.
Resistance to disease and insects is a taxonomic and an economic character of much importance. Thus there are great variations among varieties in resistance to peach-yellows, brown-rot and leaf-curl, the three commonest diseases of this fruit in New York, as there is also in resistance to San Jose scale, the worst insect-pest of the peach in this region and to the peach-borer, the commonest. These examples are multiplied in the discussions of varieties, pains having been taken in the peach-orchards at this Station to determine the relative resistance of all varieties to the pests of this region.
But little attention need be paid to the old bark on peach-trees, since in all varieties it is much the same and is unimportant to the cultivator. The bark of all varieties varies in color on different soils and is always of a lighter hue in cold than in warm regions, in dry than in wet situations.
The branches and branchlets of varieties are very characteristic. The length, thickness, direction, rigidity and the branching angle are all stable characters of varieties, changing but little with differences in soil and climate. The length of the internode is important as is also color, smoothness, amount of pubescence, size and appearance of the lenticels, and the presence of excrescences,—though all are exceedingly variable.
Both leaf-buds and fruit-buds are used in separating groups of peaches but are too nearly alike in the several groups to be of aid in distinguishing the varieties of any group. Fruit-buds are borne in pairs on the wood of the previous year with a leaf-bud separating the members of the pair. The only characters of buds worth noting are size, shape, color and the angle at which the buds stand out from the branches.
After the fruits, the leaves offer the best means of determining groups and varieties of peaches. Leaves are variable, it is true, but usually within limits quite easily set, since the conditions causing the variations are easily discovered. The most usual ones are extremes in soil, moisture, light, heat and the age of the wood upon which the leaves are borne. Much care has been taken to illustrate as accurately as possible the leaves of the varieties given color-plates in this text, size and form being reproduced exactly and color as nearly as color-plate printing permits.
Leaf-size and leaf-form are the first characters of the foliage to study in determining varieties. The former varies somewhat in accordance with the conditions named in the foregoing paragraph but the shape of the leaf changes but little. Fortunately for the student of varieties, leaves differ most in relative length and breadth so that the shape may be accurately indicated by figures which are used in most of the descriptions in The Peaches of New York. Comparisons of the bases and the apices of leaves of different varieties often show distinguishing marks.
The color of leaves in varieties is very constant for both surfaces. The color of the foliage gives an aspect to peaches whereby a variety may often be distinguished in its summer dress at considerable distance. Unfortunately, the colors of leaves in the color-plates in this book cannot be relied upon to give much help in studying this character. Autumnal tints are uniformly the same in peaches and not to be relied upon in classifying varieties.
Several other characters of the leaves must be studied by the systematic pomologist. The leaves of some varieties are thinner than those of others, hence thickness becomes a distinguishing character. Venation of leaves—size and arrangement of veins—is important. Pubescence of leaves cuts quite a figure in the descriptions of many fruits but in the peach is of minor importance because the leaves are not very hairy and the quantity and character of the pubescence is exceedingly variable. Some varieties have relatively few leaves—others many. The leaves of some varieties fall early—others relatively late.
The margins of peach-leaves offer valuable evidence in determining varieties. They may be serrate or crenate, doubly or singly divided, glandular or glandless. Both serrations and glands are best studied in the middle of the sides of leaves, those at the base or apex often being crowded or wanting.
Petioles differ in length, thickness, rigidity, pubescence and color, so that this organ is often a substantial help in identifying varieties. Some say the color of the petiole is correlated with that of the fruit, as it certainly is in such extreme sorts as Snowball and Indian Cling, but it is doubtful whether this correlation goes further than groups and even here does not always hold. Stipules offer no distinguishing marks of importance.
Much use is made in classifying peaches of the presence or absence, the size, color, shape, position and number of glands on the base of the leaf or on the leaf-stalk. These glands may be either stalked or sessile. The terms used in describing glands are easily understood and need no definition unless it be a few words in regard to the shape. Globose glands are small globes, reniform glands are kidney-shaped. In determining the form of glands examinations must be made several times in the season, the end of the summer offering the best opportunity and even then care must be taken to secure old leaves. Glands are less variable in adult trees than in trees not yet in bearing. Pomologists for a hundred years have noted the fact that peaches with glandless leaves are very susceptible to mildew. We find this to be the case on the grounds of this Station. This correlation between glandlessness and mildew may account for the fact that peaches with glandless leaves are rapidly disappearing from American peach-lists. Wickson says it has been found that peaches with glandless leaves resist leaf-curl.163
Gregory has made a careful study of the glands on peach-leaves.164 We publish here the most important facts he brings out.
"In a large number of cases the glands are stable and can be safely used to aid in the identification of certain varieties. There are also varieties in which the glands are exceptionally unstable, being on the border line between the two types—reniform and globose—and having what might be termed mixed glands. These mixed glands are of two kinds: one in which the majority of the glands are reniform, with some globose intermingled; the other in which the globose form predominates. It would be quite possible, as Carriere (1867) suggests, to distinguish a third type of glands—the mixed type.
It is important that leaves should be chosen from healthy branches on bearing trees. It is also best to obtain a large number of leaves or to examine the tree carefully before making the final selection of leaves. Mature leaves are best because their glands are full-sized and correctly shaped, while on young leaves the form of the glands is usually obscure. This is particularly true of the reniform glands. On the other hand, old, partly decayed, globose glands frequently have much the appearance of reniform glands.
The structure of the glands shows that they are true glands, having an upper layer of long, rectangular, secretory cells that produce a sweet substance, the function of which is not apparent. After the glands have ceased secreting they begin to decay, becoming brown on the upper surface and slowly disappearing until almost nothing is left. This decaying is a very complicated process, being preceded in every case by a suberization and thickening of the cell walls.
"The spines of the leaf are very similar to the glands in structure, having the same upper layer of long cells, but with much more heavily cutinized walls. A study of the transitional forms indicates that the glands are merely modified leaf spines.
The leaves with reniform glands are apparently the highest type and the glandless leaves the lowest, with the transition through the globose type. In support of this view is the fact that whenever typically glandless leaves become possessed of glands they are always of the globose type.
The serrations of the glandless leaves are very strikingly different from those on a leaf with glands. The former leaves are deeply and doubly serrate, while the margins of the latter are always single and crenate. Almost invariably, when glands develop on a normally glandless leaf, the serrations are transformed to crenations, indicating that there is a very close correlation between the glands and the crenations on the edges of the leaves."
The French pomologists, Poiteau and Turpin,165 seem to have first made note of the glands in describing peaches, recording their discovery by M. Desprez in the nurseries at the Luxembourg in 1810, after which, for a half-century, French, English and German pomologists regarded them as an infallible means of distinguishing varieties. But, by the middle of the Nineteenth Century, classifiers began to give them up because of their variability on leaves of trees of the same variety or even on the same tree. Even Darwin made note of their insufficiency in taxonomic work.166 Now, no one familiar with any considerable number of varieties of peaches would attach very great importance to glands in a system of classification.
The flowers of peaches are very characteristic, helping to delineate the groups in the several classificatory schemes of various pomologists and being ample to identify not a few varieties. Peach-flowers differ in time of appearance; in length of blooming-season; they may be large, medium or small; pink, rose and rarely white; borne on pedicels of varying length, thickness, color and pubescence; and both the floral and reproductive organs have modifications of their several structures. The size, color and shape of peach-flowers are well shown in the first six color-plates. In some species of Prunus, as some of the plums, the reproductive organs differ greatly in ability to perform their functions, but the blossoms of edible peaches are seemingly always self-fertile and there are less often the mal-formations found in the reproductive organs of some plums.
A well-marked correlation167 between the color in the inside of the calyx-cup and the color of the flesh of the fruit is one of the distinguishing features of peaches. Yellow-fleshed peaches develop from blossoms in which the inside color of the calyx-cup is orange; white-fleshed peaches develop from those in which the color is greenish or greenish-yellow sometimes approaching a very light orange easily distinguished from the dark orange of the other group. Since the discovery of this correlation in the Station orchards by Mr. Charles Tubergen it has been in yearly use and has enabled us to tell a year or two in advance the flesh-color of seedling peaches, since the first peach-blossoms seldom set fruit.
The fruits, however, furnish by far the best characters upon which to found a classification of peaches. The simplest classification of peaches begins by separating them into smooth-skinned and pubescent sorts; each of these divisions is redivided into clingstones and freestones; these four groups may then be separated into yellow-fleshed, white-fleshed and red-fleshed peaches; still further, most, not all, of the twelve groups made in the first three divisions, separate into round, flat or beaked peaches. These are the major characters of the fruits, little influenced by cultivation or environment, after which there are many minor characters such as size, shape, color, quality and season, all very responsive to changed conditions, that help to describe definitely the many varieties of Prunus persica. The most variable of the minor characters is shape, all peaches tending to lose rotundity in southern climates and to become oblong and beaked. The length and quantity of the pubescence on peaches vary considerably in different soils—the warmer and lighter the soil, the less pubescence. The skin adheres closely to the flesh in some varieties; in others it is non-adherent.
The characters found in the stones of the many species of Prunus are of great value in determining species but they help but little in determining the horticultural varieties of any one species. The stones of the peach do vary, however, very materially in size, shape, grooves and ridges, pitting and in characteristics at base and apex. The color-plates in this text illustrate these differences very well. One may generalize and say that the stones of the freestones are more deeply furrowed and that the sides are smoother than in the clingstones.
The characters of the peach are set forth on the opposite page by reproducing a description as made at this Station in describing a variety for The Peaches of New York. Such a description is, however, but a skeleton, as dead as dry bones, unless a living picture of the variety be made by filling out and covering the skeleton with ample remarks made as the describer studies the plant in the field.