North China peaches.—Not very distinct from the Persian peaches at the outset, its outliers running into some of the other groups as well, "North China" is now but little more than a name for a conglomerate lot of varieties grown everywhere in America except in the sub-tropic parts of the Gulf States. The North China race includes varieties characterized by fruits of large size, great beauty, tender skin and flesh, good quality and vigorous trees which bear abundantly and regularly. The group has received careful study at the Delaware Experiment Station, an account of it by G. Harold Powell having been published in the Thirteenth Annual Report from that Station in 1901. Powell prefers to call the group Chinese Cling rather than North China.
The peaches put in the North China group are so nearly akin to those in the Persian group that it is difficult to place varieties. All agree, however, in taking the European Shanghai, the American Chinese Cling, as the type-variety and, though it is probable that travelers or missionaries brought pits of some of these peaches from northern China a century or more ago, the known history of the group begins with the variety just named as the type. It is a pleasure to give Robert Fortune, the indefatigable collector of Chinese plants for the London Horticultural Society, credit for introducing these peaches into western countries. In 1844 Fortune collected a fine, large, delicious peach near Shanghai and in the autumn forwarded pits and a plant in a pot to London. The pits were sown and the seedlings produced fruit in 1852 and from among these a sort was selected and called Shanghai.[201] Pits from this first collection were probably sent to France, for the name appears in the early fifties in the pomological literature of this country.
The first American reference to the Shanghai is found in 1851[202] when fruits were exhibited at the Massachusetts Horticultural Society in Boston by R. Choate with the statement "peach from a tree imported from Shanghai." More definite are the facts of an importation made by Charles Downing in 1850. Early in that year Downing received potted peach-trees from the British consul at Shanghai under the names "Chinese Cling" and "Shanghai," supposed to be two sorts but proving to be identical. One of these trees was sent to Mr. Henry Lyons, Columbia, South Carolina, and this bore fruit in 1851.[203] From Downing's stock the variety was quickly and widely distributed and the horticultural magazines of the time gave the new peaches wide publicity, so that, from this and other importations which were made from time to time by various persons, these peaches from northern China were universally grown in the peach-orchards of America within a quarter of a century of their introduction.
South China peaches.—Those who have read the descriptions of Chinese peaches in Chapter 1 (pages 14 to 21) recognize at once the beaked varieties of South China, especially those growing about Canton. These peaches, common enough in China and cultivated there for centuries, reached occidental countries only in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. They came to America as seeds from Dr. J. T. Devan, Canton, China, to Mr. John Caldwell, Newburg, New York,[204] and were introduced into Europe probably by M. Montigny, French Consul at Shanghai, who sent seeds to the Jardin des Plantes, Paris, in 1852.[205] In recent years a number of fresh importations of seeds and plants of these honey-flavored, beaked peaches have been made by the United States Department of Agriculture.
A composite picture of South China peaches shows the following characters:
Tree of medium size, upright-spreading; branches leaving the trunk at an angle of about fifty degrees and curving upward; buds quite prominent; flowers always large and very abundant, pale pink, base of petals darker pink; leaves small, long, narrow, pointed, finely serrate, conduplicate, distributed all along the limb, dark green, in fall slightly tinged with red. Fruit small, oval, yellow or white blushed with red, slightly flattened; skin adhering to the flesh; suture very deep in basin, but does not extend more than one-third the way down; apex long and recurved; flesh white or yellow; flavor a peculiar honey-sweet; stone free or cling, long-pointed, generally curved.
As yet these honey-flavored peaches are grown commercially only in the Gulf States, the notion prevailing that they cannot be grown in the North. Quite to the contrary they do exceedingly well as far north as Geneva, though undesirable because of smallness of fruit and lateness in ripening. Of the score of the descendants of the original Honey, several are in bearing on the Station grounds, Climax, Imperial, Pallas and Triana being illustrated in The Peaches of New York. All but two or three of the varieties that are put in this group originated in Florida and most of them come from the grounds of G. L. Taber, Glen Saint Mary, of that State. An excellent bulletin, No. 73, from the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station, published in 1904, by F. C. Reimer, gives a full account of these peaches.
Is the beaked character permanent? That regions in time give rise to racial strains must have occurred to all who have read the preceding pages. The peach acquires distinct varietal characters in every great geographical region in which it is grown. Possibly in no other character is the change greater than in the long, pointed, erect or recurved apex in common parlance called the beak. As a rule, the farther south the more pronounced is the beak and the more oblong is the fruit. In this respect, southern peaches, taking them as a whole, are as markedly different from New York peaches as are the long, crowned, angular-topped apples of the Pacific Northwest from the rotund fruits of the Atlantic Northeast. The four sorts of honey-flavored peaches described and illustrated in The Peaches of New York, named in the foregoing paragraph, illustrate this well, none of them being nearly so abruptly conical as specimens coming to us from the South. Peaches in China, evidently, show the same modification, for those discussed in the previous group are as markedly rotund as those in this group are conic and beaked. It is a fair inference, then, that the beaked character of the peach, counting time in generations of the tree, is permanent only in southern climates.
Peento peaches.—Another group of these Chinese peaches, not very different from the South China varieties we have just given an account of, is composed of the score or more sorts showing relationship to the variety, Peento. These may be rather indefinitely described as follows:
Tree large, vigorous, upright-spreading; branches willow-like, branching at an angle of about forty degrees; flowers large, pink, opening early, often at a low temperature and very irregularly; leaves narrow, long, finely serrated, with reniform glands; inclined to be evergreen; fruit sub-globose except in Peento which is flattened endwise; skin white and mottled with carmine, parting readily from the flesh; flesh white or yellow; flavor sweet, with a peculiar almond taste; stone occasionally flattened endwise, either free or cling. This race is adapted to sub-tropical parts of the Gulf States where it ripens from May 1st to June 1st.