CRESCENT SEEDLING AND FOREST ROSE STRAWBERRIES.
In the American Agriculturist for August, E. P. Roe, of Cornwall-on-the-Hudson, New York, reports progress on these two new strawberries. He states that the Crescent Seedling originated with William Parmelee, New Haven, Connecticut, in 1870. Its two marked features as he has seen it in several localities, are a tendency to take entire possession of the ground, crowding out the weeds, and of literally covering the ground it grows on with fruit. Its lack of firmness, he thinks, will prove its chief fault. He saw it growing vigorously, and fruiting enormously on light soils, and in some instances other and leading varieties standing near it had proved utter failures. It has also done remarkably well on damp and heavy soil in his own grounds. In color it is a bright scarlet, and looks well in the basket. Like the Wilson, it is red before it is ripe, and in this immature state the flavor is poor, but greatly improves as the berry ripens. It has the appearance of being a pistillate, though it is claimed that it will bear alone. He noticed, however, that in a field of four acres some Wilson’s were planted at intervals, and advises that some of the perfect flowered varieties be set out near by. He finds it to ripen this season about with the Wilson.
The Forest Rose, he says, is a chance seedling, discovered by J. A. Fetters, of Lancaster, Ohio, in his vineyard, about seven years ago, and that it surpasses the other in flavor, beauty, and particularly in its shipping qualities, but that thus far it has not proved with him to be anything like so productive. In sending some thirty-six varieties to the Queen’s County Fair he found that it suffered the least from transportation of them all. He is growing it on three kinds of soil; the stiffest kind of clay, a light, moist soil, and a gravelly knoll, and it is doing well in each. Thus far with him the foliage has never rusted or burned. He expresses his hopes in regard to it, by saying that he planted it more largely than any other kind last spring. He quotes Dr. J. A. Warder, of Ohio, as saying of it, “here we have elegance of form, brilliancy in color, great size, and firmness to bear transportation, combined with table qualities of a higher order than in Wilson’s Albany, which it surpasses even in field culture.”
Mr. Roe concludes with the following judicious remark, “I may seem an old fogy when I say that while I shall give these plausible strangers plenty of room in which to prove their merits, I shall still stand by my old and tried friends in the strawberry field.”
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EXPERIMENTS IN HYBRIDIZATION.
It is well known to cultivators of the Camellia that the venerable President of the American Pomological Society, the Hon. Marshall P. Wilder, achieved great success in the raising of new varieties, yielding double flowers, from seed hybridized by himself, and that many of the flowers raised by him were exquisite models of perfection of form. This marked success he attributes largely to three things, first, that in the selection of the seed-bearing parent he used hybrids, believing that every change effected by cross-fertilization is a remove from the normal form, and therefore more easily susceptible of continued mutations; second, that in the selection of the flower to be impregnated he had special reference to the strength and prominence of the style, the form of the corolla, and the perfection of its petals; and third, that he used only pollen taken from an anther which was supported by a petaloid stamen, that is, a stamen which had taken on the form, more or less, of a petal. He regarded this petaloid form of the stamen as the incipient stage towards a full petalous form, and that when he fertilized such flowers with this petaloid pollen, he was more likely to secure double seedlings, with petals more or less multiplied, and oftentimes perfectly double, than when the pollen was taken from anthers borne upon perfect stamens. And the larger and better developed the petaloid stamen was, that is, the more nearly the stamen had taken on the form of a petal, the better the chance for obtaining finely formed double flowers. His experiments led him to the conclusion that single or semi-double flowers with perfect corollas are more certain to produce flowers of a regular symmetrical formation, than those whose corollas have been irregular, with considerable variation in the size and form of the different petals; and likewise that when the style was feeble, distorted, or imperfectly developed, the results were likely to be very unsatisfactory.
As some of our readers are making experiments in the production of double flowers, we hope they will give us the results of their labors for publication.
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