Carolina and on Governor Grant's plantation in East Florida. English and Italian gardeners were employed by certain of the wealthier planters and often exhibited superior skill in matters of grafting and propagating plants and shrubs. At first grafts were obtained from England and the Continent, but as early as 1735 Paul Amatis started his "Georgian Nursery" in South Carolina, and later William Prince established in the North a large fruit nursery at Flushing, Long Island, where he said that he had fifteen thousand trees fit to remove, "all innoculated and grafted from bearing trees. Christian Leman began a similar nursery at Germantown, Pennsylvania. Of the smaller fruits, strawberries, blackberries, and gooseberries were cultivated and highly prized; wild strawberries and huckleberries were as well known as they are now; and grapes were found in enormous quantities in a wild state, though efforts to grow vineyards for the purpose of making wine were never very successful. In preparing vegetables and fruits for preserving, both for the winter's supply at home and the › Grafting was practiced in New England at an early date. The Reverend Joseph Green of Salem says in his diary, that on April 17, 1701, he grafted 59 "cyons on 24 trees. Essex Institute Historical Collections, vol. vii, p. 220. |
