North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

Given the number of fruits Hedrick worked with, his error rate is pretty low.  Of the grapes I have that are covered in The Grapes of New York, all fit the descriptions pretty closely, with no more variation than might be accounted for by climate.
That doesn't mean the old sources are highly accurate, only that they are still the best starting point we have.  However, as Heron points out, there is no guarantee they are absolutely perfect, and we should cross-compare with as many other sources as possible.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com  Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003.
On Aug 9, 2005, at 6:54 PM, Heron Breen wrote:


Hi All,
I went and tasted the fruits of the "Bangor" blackberry I wrote about a few months 
ago (see past threads) and it is delicious. Very mild and perfumy sweet. Even the 
black but not full ripe ones have no sourness to them. Thumb-tip joint size to 
middle-finger joint tip size. Knowing that these are indeed the heirloom 
blackberries in question due to its current keeper having recieved the plants from 
the originator's cousin 60 or so years ago now brings an interesting contradiction:
U P Hedrick trialed and rated "Bangor" in "The Small Fruits of NY", I believe, and 
rated as small and insipid. This berry is neither. Three possibilities are
1- The berry observed by Hedrick was not true to name.
2- The berry observed by Hedrick was affected by a warmer climate
3- The berry observed by Hedrick was mixed up with another one when collecting and 
reviewing data.

This leads me to ask whether we should be trusting older sources any more than we 
trust newer sources of reference. Newer soures of reference can be just as unclear 
or wrong, even with color pictures. (Recently this was proven true in my life with 
an attempt to identify the leaf type of Valerian, different books illustrating and 
picturing both palmate and pinnate.) Just because some older book says a certain 
fruit variety is awful does not mean it should be ruled out? Maybe we are using 
these 'histories' as guides, but I would have been a fool to ignore this blackberry 
on Hedrick's opinion.
What do you all think?
Heron Breen
zone 4, Maine