America's Crop Heritage


Experiment stations set up in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and the
Philippines tested tropical plants before their introduction into
the United States.

 INTRODUCTIONS BY MEYER
 One of America's outstanding plant explorers, Frank N.
Meyer, made four trips to Asia over a period of twelve years,
and sent back more than twenty-five hundred introductions. He
was first sent to Asia in 1905 by the Office of Seed and Plant
Introduction with instructions to secure plants of unusual vigor
and hardiness. Meyer's first shipment contained varieties of the
English walnut, the Chinese pistache, wild and cultivated apri-
cots, wild peaches, hardy apples, Chinese grapes, and edible-
fruited hawthorn, ornamental and shade trees, millets, field
beans, and lawn sedge.
 Two years later, Meyer sent more than a thousand seed and
plant specimens from China, Siberia, and Manchuria.' In 1908,
he shipped seedless Chinese persimmons, new spruces, elms, and
pines. He returned to the United States with a wealth of informa-
tion on dry-land farming, Chinese agriculture, forestry, and
market gardening.
 Meyer began his second tour of Asia in 1909 through the
semidesert areas in the Crimea, the Caucasus, Bokhara, and the
Chinese Turkestan. He sent varieties of the Chinese lychee to
the United States about the same time that other varieties of
this fruit were being secured from Java and the Philippines.
By 1910, he had made promising discoveries of wild almonds,
"Afghasian" apples, varieties of pears, Erivan alfalfa, cold-
resistant Crimean olives, a good collection of table grapes, a
drouth-resistant apple, a collection of edible, sweet-kernelled
apricots, a collection of winter wheats from southern Russia,
and many soil binding plants.
 Meyer secured many different varieties of the Chinese jujube
and citrus fruits. In 1913, he found chestnut trees which were
resistant to the bark disease then attacking chestnut trees in the
United States. Other trees Meyer obtained were the Chinese
early cherry which came to be grown commercially in California;

 'Of these, the Department was particularly interested in the northern Man-
 churian apples, blackberries and currants from Korea, twenty-four named pears
 of North China, bush cherries, plums and peaches from northern Siberia, drouth-
 resistant alfalfas, dry-land rices, and many ornamentals.