The Horticulturist and journal of rural art and rural taste, 26(306): 360 (December, 1871)

Two of the Humbugs
BY OCCIDENTALIS

I KNOW it will not do to call everything a humbug that happens to fail on our own grounds. To do so, would be to discard perhaps three-fourths of the varieties of fruits known to horticulture.

But when anything is proven to be valueless everywhere—or even in a majority of cases—I think it may very properly be classed as a humbug. Among these I undertake to name the Crystal White Blackberry. With an over-zealous disposition to test things, I procured some of them about four years since. Annually, until this year, I have been anxiously awaiting in vain for its crystal white berries, but it winter-killed to the ground each season. The past winter, however, it carried through a fine growth of wood, and I have been rewarded with a prolific yield of fruit.

But, O, such berries! Not so large as a majority of the wild blackberries of the woods; and as to color, they are not black, they are not white, they are not red. Instead, they are a shiny brown. How any one could have conceived the idea of naming them Crystal White, passeth my comprehension. The color, however, may do, but the quality is simply execrable. Quinine may be taken as a medicine; but few people can be found, I reckon, who will relish it as a dessert. This fruit very strongly resembles it in taste, and is in every sense a vile thing—fit only to take a place in the Materia Medica as an ague cure.

How any person who had ever tasted the fruit, could desire to introduce it as an acquisition, or how any nurseryman could, after a trial of its quality, be induced to place it in his catalogue and send it out, is one of the mysteries of horticulture. I write this without knowing to whom the public is indebted for its introduction; only remembering that many most respectable and reliable nurserymen have it on their catalogues.

In the same list I would place the Van Buren Golden Dwarf Peach. For several years it has persistently refused to bear a peach or show a blossom. It has been winter-protected, and left exposed, always with the same results. Other peaches, named and seedlings, hardy and tender, have borne abundant crops around it; so that it may be set down as a total failure. It may perhaps answer well enough for the latitude of Georgia, where it originated; but he who plants it in the Northern or Western states, will look for crops in vain.