The Avocado
P. gratissima, Gaertn.
In Florida and southern California the avocado or alligator pear is being extensively cultivated. This laurel grows wild in the West Indies, Brazil, Peru, and Mexico. Its berry attains the size of a large pear. It has been developed in several commercial varieties, all having smooth green or purple skin, and soft oily pulp like marrow surrounding a single gigantic seed. It is usually cut in two like a melon and eaten raw as a salad dressed with vinegar, salt, and pepper. Once a stranger acquires the taste, he is extremely fond of this new salad fruit. The growing of the trees is easy and very profitable. At present the fruits are in great demand in city markets, and the prices are too high for any but the rich to enjoy this luxury.
Where a market is difficult to reach, the abundant oil is expressed from these fruits and used for illumination and the manufacture of soap. The seeds yield an indelible ink.
It is interesting to the student of trees to note how many tropical families have representation in North America, due to the fact that Florida extends into the tropics, and the West Indies seem to form a sort of bridge over which Central American and South American species have reached the Floridian Keys and the mainland.
The Sassafras
Sassafras, Karst.
The sole remnant of an ancient genus is the aromatic sassafras familiar as a roadside tree that flames in autumn with the star gum and the swamp maples. In the deep woods it reaches a height of more than a hundred feet and is an important lumber tree. In the arctic regions and in the rocky strata of our western mountains, fossil leaves of sassafras are preserved, and the same traces are found in Europe, giving to the geologist proofs that the genus once had a much wider range than now. But no living representative of the genus was known outside of eastern North America, until the report of a recently discovered sassafras in China.
The Indians in Florida named the sassafras to the inquiring colonists who came with Columbus. They explained its curative properties, and its reputation traveled up the Atlantic seaboard. The first cargo of home products shipped by the colonists back to England from Massachusetts contained a large consignment of sassafras roots. To-day we look for an exhibit of sassafras bark in drug-store windows in spring. People buy it and make sassafras tea which they drink "to clear the blood." "In the Southwestern states the dried leaves are much used as an ingredient in soups, for which they are well adapted by the abundance of mucilage they contain. For this purpose the mature green leaves are dried, powdered (the stringy portions being separated), sifted and preserved for use. This preparation mixed with soups gives them a ropy consistence and a peculiar flavor, much relished by those accustomed to it. To such soups are given the names gombo file and gombo zab." (Seton.)
Emerson says that in New England a decoction of sassafras bark gave to the housewife's homespun woolen cloth a permanent orange dye. The name "Ague Tree" originated with the use of sassafras bark tea as a stimulant that warmed and brought out the perspiration freely for victims of the malarial "ague," or "chills and fever."