The peaches of New York

by U. P. Hedrick

TREE- AND FRUIT-CHARACTERS OF THE PEACH

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.