The vegetables which, so far as we know their history,
seem to have been longest objects of human care, can,
by painstaking industry, be made to grow under a great
variety of circumstances, and some of them prosper
nearly equally well when planted and tended on soils
of almost any geological character; but the seeds
of most of them vegetate only in artificially prepared
ground, they have little self-sustaining power, and
they soon perish when the nursing hand of man is withdrawn
from them.
The vine genus is very catholic and cosmopolite in
its habits, but particular varieties are extremely
fastidious and exclusive in their requirements as
to soil and climate. The stocks of many celebrated
vineyards lose their peculiar qualities by transplantation,
and the most famous wines are capable of production
only in certain well-defined and for the most part
narrow districts. The Ionian vine which bears
the little stoneless grape known in commerce as the
Zante currant, has resisted almost all efforts to
naturalize it elsewhere, and is scarcely grown except
in two or three of the Ionian islands and in a narrow
territory on the northern shores of the Morea.
The attempts to introduce European varieties of the
vine into the United States have not been successful
except in California, [Footnote: In 1869, a vine
of a European variety planted in Sta. Barbara
county in 1833 measured a foot in diameter four foot
above the ground. Its ramifications covered ten
thousand square feet of surface and it annually produces
twelve thousand pounds of grapes. The bunches
are sixteen or eighteen inches long, and weigh six
or seven pounds.-Letter from Commissioner of Land-Office,
dated May 13, 1860.] and it may be stated as a general
rule that European forest and ornamental trees are
not suited to the climate of North America, and that,
at the same time, American garden vegetables are less
luxuriant, productive and tasteful in Europe than
in the United States.
The saline atmosphere of the sea is specially injurious
both to seeds and to very many young plants, and it
is only recently that the transportation of some very
important vegetables across the ocean lines been made
practicable, through the invention of Ward’s
air-tight glass cases. By this means large numbers
of the trees which produce the Jesuit’s bark
were successfully transplanted from America to the
British possessions in the East, where this valuable
plant may now be said to have become fully naturalized.
[Footnote: See Cleghorn, Forests and Gardens
of South India, Edinburgh, 1861, and The British Parliamentary
return on the Chinchona Plant, 1866. It has been
found that the seeds of several species of cinchona
preserve their vitality long enough to be transported
to distant regions. The swiftness of steam navigation
render it possible to transport to foreign countries
not only seeds but delicate living plants which could
not have borne a long voyage by sailing vessels.]
