PLANT INTRODUCTION The organization of plant-introduction work and some of its problems.
It was not until 1897 that this great work of finding, getting, importing, and sending out new plants was put on a scientific basis and the Section of Seed and Plant Introduction made an integral part of the Department of Agriculture. The organ ization of the Office as it now stands owes its smoothly working machinery to the painstaking efforts of Mr. Adrian J. Pieters, who has put into the work years of study and thought, and who, together with the writer, has general charge today. This Office has almost constantly had agricultural explorers and collectors in the field, and has worked out a system that takes care of every plant sent in and of every seed distributed, and it is on a basis of accurate cooperation with the experiment sta tions and farmers all over the country. Every one of the more than 19,000 specimens that have been sent in by agricultural explorers, by friends of the work or by correspondents, or that have been purchased abroad, has been put on permanent record and then sent out to some one who was especially interested in it ; and, as far as possible, each introduction has been followed up and the result recorded. Over 120,000 cards record the distributions, and thousands of reports now on file form a most valuable historical record of the systematic plant introductions of the past eight years. The aim of the work has been pre eminently a practical one, and the introductions have been made to meet some demand either of an experiment station or of a plant-breeder, or to carry out the idea of some one of the explorers who saw in a foreign plant industry the possibility of its utilization in this country. The work of early years failed in doing the great good that it was capable of because it was not systematic, because no adequate records were kept, and be cause the public were not alive to its great possi bilities. Today the interest in new plants is so much greater than it was twenty years ago that large numbers of the really suggestive applications from private experimenters cannot be met by the Office for lack of funds.
A very brief sketch of some of the interesting problems that are on the program of the Office will illustrate the opening vista of plant introduction as a government enterprise. The largest collection of date varieties ever made is now growing in gardens in Arizona and California (Figs. 89, 90). The largest collection of tropical mangoes in the world is in greenhouses or already in the hands of experi menters in Florida, Porto Rico and Hawaii. Thous ands of the Japanese matting rush plants, from which the valuable Japanese matting is made, of which this country imports several million dollars' worth every year, are being grown in South Caro lina. A new and valuable salad plant from Japan, the udo (Fig. 13), is being grown from Maine to Flor ida. The superior varieties of French bur artichoke have - been introduced for trial in the trucking re gion of the South. The berseem, the greatest of annual winter forage crops from the Nile valley, is now being grown experi mentally in the new irri gated regions of the South west (Fig. 91). Kafir corns from
the uplands of Abyssinia, the east coast of Africa and India are being tested in Kansas and other places in the West. New varieties of alfalfa, the one from Turkestan, the other from Ara bia, are both attracting the attention of alfalfa-growers in those sections where alfalfa is the great forage crop. In Alaska a newly found variety of oat, from northern Finland, is proving superior to all others. Before these lines are printed the sisal industry of Yucatan will have been given a start in Porto Rico through the assistance of the organization that the Office of Plant Introduction has built up. At the request of the State Experiment Station of North Carolina, peanuts have been gathered from all over the world for the use of breeding experi menters in the South. Pentzia, an in teresting fodder plant of the " kar roo," has been sent to one of the bar ren islands of the Hawaiian group for trial. The Hanna, a pedigreed barley variety from Moravia, is now being given a practi cal test by the brewers in St. Louis and California, and its uniform character and good yields on the Pacific coast have aleady led to its cultivation on a large scale. A new root crop from Porto Rico, the yautia (Figs. 114, 115, page 105, Vol. I), promi nently brought forward by Mr. Barrett, now of this Office, is to be practically tried in northern Florida and the Carolinas, in both of which places it has proved its ability to grow. The plant from which Japan makes her papers of unexcelled quality is growing in the plant-introduction garden in Cali fornia (Fig. 92). The wood-oil tree of the Yang-tse valley has been imported from Han Kow, and there are on hand in California hundreds of plants with which to make the first trials of this interesting oil producing plant, the product of which is imported into America in increasing quantities every year to be used for varnish and imitation rubber manu facturing purposes. The hardy bamboos of the Orient have been imported, and, as far as the funds of the Office have allowed, these have been placed at several places in the South where the old "cane brakes," which are growths of a commercially worthless species of bamboo, indicate that the valuable kind from Japan may be expected to grow successfully. Answering an appeal from the rice planters of the Carolinas, whose plantations have been devastated by a very serious disease, rices of the type-of the famous Carolina Golden have been imported from the Orient, Africa, the West Indies and Italy, with the hope of finding one that will resist the disease. This hope has not yet been ful filled, although there is one variety at least that has some promise of being useful in the rice-fields of the region. An early introduction of one of the agricultural explorers was the fenugreek, a plant the seeds of which, when ground, form the body of most of the condition powders so much used by raisers of fat-stock show animals; and although the manufacturers of these condition powders still import their seed from abroad, the Californians have learned that fenugreek is one of their best cover-crops, as it stands up especially well and can be plowed under easily.