The most striking change in fruits during my time has been in the cultivation of cranberries. They have always been known as a native of New England, and John Smith found them in a visit here in 1614. They have always found their best natural growth in grassy meadows or swamps, where decay of vegetable matter has supplied the soil with organic acids. I know some patches of such meadows today where the cranberry has borne fruit hundreds of years. These natural berries are better than the cultivated ones, probably because the sand with which the made bog is covered has diminished the supply of organic acids. The general consumer has not yet discovered that the native berry weighs a number of pounds more to the bushel than the cultivated one, and has a richer flavor. In 1855 the statistics of Plymouth showed an acre and a half of cranberry bog valued at $15—while at the present time there are 984 acres valued at $393,600.
Some fruits which were abundant in our gardens during my youth, have entirely disappeared. I knew then scarcely a garden without its plums, gages and damsons, the latter of which were especially prized for preserving. When it is asked what has become of these trees, it is often answered that they have run out. But such an answer is absurd, because if they had run out in one place, they would have run out everywhere. But the plum and gage are raised in California and sold in Boston and Plymouth at a profit to the producer after a travel of three thousand miles across the continent. The trouble is that the soil has run out after nearly three centuries of cultivation without renewal of those properties and ingredients which successive crops have exhausted. If the virgin soils of California were analyzed, and their fertilizing constituents when discovered were applied to our worn out gardens, they would doubtless be rejuvenated. Our people have not even been content with robbing the ground of its crops without adding to and restoring its vitality, but they have year after year raked out every stone, great and small, leaving the ground a mere black paste, instead of a vigorous loam. They have yet to learn that the feldspar in granite contains potash enough if we knew how to extract it to fertilize the fields in which the farmer looks on stones as nuisances to be rid of. I have seen some evidence in the rank growth of grass around stone heaps and under stone walls that nature may have found some method by chemical action of eliminating the feldspar potash which the rocks contain. The condition of the trees on Boston Common, of which in late years we have heard much complaint illustrates in my opinion the necessity of restoring to the soil precisely those qualities which year after year the trees have been using up. Mr. Doogue, the superintendent, last season, or the season before, ploughed the ground and planted grain as if the surface needed loosening and enriching to permit the access of rain to the roots of the trees, but I do not believe that he has reached or remedied the trouble. If he would come to Plymouth I could show him by an object lesson what the trees need. Let him make a visit to our woods, where with no more than two inches of soil on a substratum of sand and gravel, a thick growth of oaks and pines sends up every season a foot or more of upward growth, and preserves through the dryest summers a rich foliage. They simply live on the leaves which they shed in the autumn for their own use, and which they find in the spring that no robber has carried away. If Mr. Doogue, instead of raking the common and carting off the leaves will deposit them in trenches around the trees covered with a little earth, his trees will doubtless revive.
Among the trees which have practically disappeared in my day are the Buttonwood and Balm of Gilead. The Buttonwood or Sycamore or Plane tree, grew in various localities within the town, and until about the year 1845, a row of Buttonwoods stood on the front of the lot which now includes Cushman street and the lots on both sides. Jas. Russell Lowell was undoubtedly familiar with it when he wrote in his “Beaver Brook.”
“Beneath a bony buttonwood
The mill’s red door swings open wide;
The whitened miller, dust imbued,
Flits past the square of dark inside.”
The Buttonwood bush is an entirely distinct plant deriving its name from the globules it bears resembling buttons in shape.
There was during my youth a row of Balm of Gileads or Balsam poplars five or six in number, standing below the stone wall opposite the North side of the Plymouth Rock House. The buds of the trees covered with a resinous matter, were much sought after as cures for cuts and wounds. Only a very few of these trees are now standing in Plymouth.
There is the hornbeam tree often spoken of in the division of lands in the early days of Plymouth Colony, of which very few specimens are now found in our woods. Wood in “New England’s Prospect,” under date of 1639 says, “the horn bound tree is a tough kind of wood that requires so much pains in riving as is almost incredible; being the best to make bowls and dishes, not being subject to crack or leak.” He says: