Beginning late in the last century, however, there was a revival in peach-planting in Delaware, especially the northern part of the State, and now a new peach-industry seems well started in which, through energetic orchard-sanitation and diversified horticulture, yellows, for the present at least, is held at bay. The palmy days of fabulous prices for peaches and peach-lands, however, are past in Delaware. Here, as in other communities ravaged by yellows, the value of lands has sunk to a half or a quarter of what it would have brought a generation ago in the height of peach-culture. In some cases property, formerly valuable, has lost all value—a peach-farm will not sell at any price. The best peach-lands are seldom fit for other crops, so that in Delaware, New Jersey and Michigan the whole community, including railroads and steamboat lines, suffers to the verge of bankruptcy when yellows exterminates the orchards.
Probably in no other State in the Union is the peach more perfectly at home than in Maryland, it having held undisputed supremacy among fruits in that State for over a century and a half. Yellows, though always menacing, has not been so devastating as in Delaware to the north. Erwin F. Smith thinks that yellows has been present in the northern counties of eastern Maryland for many years—since 1844 or 1845. In his detailed account of the disease in this State[253] he records but one destructive outbreak of yellows, this occurring in the summers of 1886, 1887 and 1888 in the northeastern part of the State where in two counties along the whole length of the Sassafras River it was destructively present. Smith notes that yellows, at this time, "is moving southward on the peninsula." Since Smith's account, 1888, reports from Maryland show that, while the disease is still present and is now in practically all parts of the State, either it is not now so virulent or is kept in check by extirpating diseased trees. Still, however, the great decrease in the number of peach-trees in Maryland in the last twenty years is largely due to yellows, there being 6,113,287 bearing trees in 1889, but 4,017,854 in 1899, and only 1,497,724 in 1909.
In the South, west of the Mississippi, and on the Pacific Coast, yellows does not exist or if so is not epidemic.
Would that it could be recorded, as we conclude this brief account of yellows and its plague-spots in America, that in the hundred years of conflict some headway had been made in ascertaining from whence the disease came, what its cause and what the cure. Would, too, that we could believe that the final holocaust has passed. But we cannot bandage our eyes against the facts. We are as profoundly ignorant of yellows as at the start. And, while New York at the moment is nearly free from yellows, everywhere the sinister reminders of ancient epidemics, like skeletons at a feast that are never out of sight, bid us be on our guard for new outbreaks.
PEACH-BREEDING
But little effort has been made, as the histories of its varieties show, to breed peaches. All but a very few varieties have come from chance seedlings. Peaches were grown from seed for centuries and many types now come true when seeds are planted. After budded trees became the vogue, until Mendel's great discovery, breeding the peach consisted in selecting an occasional meritorious tree, multiplying it by budding and, if it had pronounced merit, turning it over to a nurseryman for the trade. The art progressed no further because selection was thought to be the fundamental process in improving plants and breeders preferred to work in fields where the harvests were more immediate than in tree-fruits. Now that plant-breeding centers around controlled hybridization, plants propagated vegetatively should receive quite as much attention as those grown from seed. Mendel has opened the door to intimate familiarity with some of the fundamental phenomena of hybridization, and, despite the difficult and complex literature the professionals are imposing on the art, chiefly discussions of methods and disputations about principles, the layman finds Mendelian laws easy to put in practice; and peach-breeding is certain to go forward in leaps and bounds as the irresistible fascination of the subject seizes peach-growers.
Meanwhile, as a foundation for future work, it becomes highly important to know how the varieties we have came into existence. The known histories of the many diverse kinds of peaches show that this fruit has been improved almost wholly through new varieties by chance hybridization—self-fertilized seed, selection and mutations are almost negligible factors. The following are the data: No case is recorded in The Peaches of New York of a variety known to have come from a self-fertilized seed. The seed parent is given for 214 varieties; the seed and pollen parents of 37 varieties. But 4 varieties are reported to have come from bud-mutations. Of chance seedlings, sorts from seed with neither parent known, there are 161. The origins of 1765 of the varieties described in The Peaches of New York are unknown. The total number of peaches described is 2181.
CHAPTER IV
PEACH-GROWING IN NEW YORK
The history of the peach, whether narrative or natural, shows that this fruit succeeds commercially only in restricted areas under special soil and climatic conditions. In the United States, as we have seen, the peach-industry has sprung up in a dozen or more distinct geographical regions, three of which are in New York. In discussing peach-growing in New York we must, first, determine the boundaries of its peach-regions; second, show the relative importance of the peach-industry in each; and, third, note the determinants that make favored parts of the State peach-regions.