Early Horticulture in California [pp. 117-128]

Early Horticulture in California.
The "Edinburgh Review," which had given unquestioned currency to many "travelers' tales" concerning the large gold yield of
California placers, happened to find an agricultural report of i855, and said: "At the
State Fair held at Sacramento, California,
were exhibited among other prodigies, a beet
weighing seventy-three pounds, a carrot
weighing ten pounds, and three feet, three
inches in length (there were fifty in the same
bed of equal size); a corn-stalk measuring
twenty-one feet, nine inches in length; an
apple measuring fifteen and a half inches
each way. But we cannot tell how much
may be owing to that Cyclopean grandeur of
description in which American fancy is apt
to indulge."
The State Fairs of I85 7 and I 858 brought
to the front a beet that weighed one hundred
and twenty-five pounds; a turnip that surpassed thirty pounds in weight; a cornstalk
that was twenty-five feet in height, and pears
that weighed four pounds apiece. The noted pear that was grown in i858 on a threeyear-old tree in the garden of Mr. E. L.
Beard, at the Mission San Jose, weighed two
and a quarter pounds; and although specimens of this variety (the Pound or Winter
Bell) have since been grown of equal or even
greater size, yet this one became known
abroad as none since, a life-size engraving
being made, and published in several journals.
Everywhere in the early horticultural literature of the Pacific Coast, we find efforts
to map out the climatic zones, and a full recognition of the broader problems that have
perplexed the planters of orchards and gardens to the present day. Mr. Wadsworth,
in establishing the " California Culturist," in
i858, wrote: "So peculiar and so strongly
marked are our climates that a new system
of cultivating the soil seems almost indispensable." Dr. Horace Bushnell, in an article
upon the "Characteristics and Prospects of
California," which appeared in the "New
Englander," gave the ablest account of the
subject that had up to that time appeared
in any journal. The following extracts are
worth permanent place in the history of hor
ticulture, for they define with skill and science the conditions which prevail here:
"Conceive that middle California, the region of
which we now speak, lying between the headwaters
of the two great rivers, and about four hundred and
fifty or five hundred miles long from north to south,
is divided lengthwise, parallel to the coast, into three
strips, or ribands of about equal width. First, the
coast-wise region, comprising two, three, and sometimes four parallel tiers of mountains, from five hundred to four thousand, five thousand, or even ten
thousand feet high. Next, advancing inward, we
have a middle strip, from fifty to seventy miles
wide, of almost dead plain, which is called the
great valley; down the scarely perceptible slopes
of which, from north and south, run the two great
rivers, the Sacramento and the San Joaquin, to join
their waters at the middle of the basin, and pass off
into the sea. The third long strip, or riband, is the
slope of the Sierra Nevada chain, which bounds the
great valley on the east, and contains in its foot-hills,
or rather in its lower half, all the gold mines. The
upper half is, to a great extent, bare granite rock,
and is crowned at the summit with snow about eight
months of the year.
"Now the climate of these parallel strips will be
different, almost of course; and subordinate, local
differences, quite as remarkable, will result from subordinate features in the local configurations, particularly of the seaward strip or portion. For all the varieties of climate, distinct as they become, are made
by variations wrought in the rates of motion, the
courses, the temperature, and the dryness of a single
wind, viz: the trade wind of the summer months,
which blows directly inward all the time, only with
much greater power during that part of the day when
the rarefaction of the great central valley comes to its
aid; that is from ten o'clock in the morning until the
setting of the sun. Conceive such a wind, chilled by
the cold waters which have come down from the
Northern Pacific, perhaps from Behring Straits,
combing the tops and wheeling through the valleys
of the coast-wise mountains, crossing the great valley
at a much retarded rate, and growing hot and dry,
fanning gently the foot-hills and sides of the Sierra,
still more retarded by the piling necessary to break
over into Utah; and the conditions of the California
climate, or climates, will be understood with general
accuracy. Greater simplicity in the matter of climate
is impossible, and greater variety is hardly to be imagined.
"We return now to the coast-wise mountain region, where the multiplicity and confusion of climates
is most remarkable. Their variety, we shall find, depends on the courses of the wind currents, turned
hither and thither by the mountains; partly also on
the side any given place occupies of its valley or
mountain, and partly on the proximity of the sea.
Sprinkled in among these mountains, and more or
1885.]
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