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."
ADAPTABILITY AND VARIABILITY IN THE PEACH
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 Egypt[143] 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." Wight[150] 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.