I have fruited the Satsuma seven years. I have a hundred times written men who were planting or budding groves, " You do not want more than a half dozen trees of Satsuma." They.are like so many Japanese varieties, in this climate, so liable to attacks of fungi and insects. They are more hardy than the Mandarins, but not enough so to be grown far north. On the morning of the 17th of March last, at a temperature of 220, lasting not over thirty minutes before it was back to 300, every fruit set of Satsuma was killed, and the new growth all shortened back.

The Mandarins were not as forward as Satsuma and were little injured, in this freeze. I have seen some Mandarins which, by any standard of judging, would out-rank any Satsuma I have ever seen at our horticultural exhibits by ten or twelve points. I can take back very little of what I wrote in the Florida Dispatch three years since :

" The quality of the Satsuma is superior to many others. It is hardly a tree. It is a small bush at most, diminutive indeed. I have never seen one capable of holding more than half a box. True, I have no buds older than six years. It is the most hardy orange tree I have seen ; fruit has loose rind, is highly colored and very few seeds. Plant six by twelve feet." - Lyman Phelps, Florida.

Satsuma Orange #1

In reply to your correspondent's question as to the Satsuma, in Aug. issue (p. 491), permit me to say, I am not a stranger to the trifoliata stock. I have also worked the Satsuma on the sour orange, the sweet, and on the lemon. The peculiar death cold, so still, on the morning of March 17, 1890, was no respecter of varieties, when it caught them with the full flow of sap up. Trees which had been irrigated had been growing all winter ; all the stored forces of the whole tree had been pushed into the new wood in the top. I had thrifty Satsumas well set with oranges. They were killed branch and root, as thoroughly as the lightning recently killed bignonias fifteen feet high for me. There was a strong similarity in the way the leaves withered. The Allamanda regina had been in constant bloom for eleven months, and had hundreds of blooms the 16th of March. The vines or canes were more than an inch in diameter. The cold killed it. I cut it close to the ground ; since then it had grown ten feet high, was full of its pure yellow bloom. The sheet of lightning swept over it, and it withered away, burned by heat.

But as "lightning never strikes twice in the same place," we are devoutly thankful to a merciful Providence which spared our lives, and it seemed the converse is sometimes true of the mediaeval monk's saying: "Media vita in morte seemus" When the breath of electricity passed along one side of an orange tree the leaves and fruit were burned, and outwardly looked like the burning of frost - only this difference - the electricity caused the more rapid decay of leaf and fruit.

By the cold of March 17th, I saw "willows by the water courses," which were a quarter of a century old, killed to the ground ; maples and gums which had been in leaf a month badly frozen back", also hickories, pecans and persimmons. In the same conditions, under a vigorous growth with a full flow of sap, a hickory would stand no more than an orange, and scarcely more than a tomato. The only Satsuma which I think is worth growing is a seedling from a single, one of the first fruits I ever saw of that variety. It has great stamina, is prolific, and not a shrub, but a tree, nor is it more liable to attacks of insect pests than the ordinary seedling, while the imported bears the palm for a home - for soft scale, and under favorable weather, for the mealy bug. The fruit, too, of the seedling, under the analytical scale of the State Horticultural Society would leave the fruit from the imported variety in the low list comparison. Not unfrequently looks or color go a great way in sales. I knew a hybrid of a tangierine and the old rough loose-rind wild lemon once to sell in Boston for $10 per box. They were flat and insipid, but they were red. Two boxes broke the market; and though that was twelve years age, I do not know of a sale ever being made again.

A few boxes of Satsumas would do the same thing. Satsumas planted at the same time, side by side, with the Jaffa and Majorca, with precisely the same treatment, do not produce a fifth as much in net results. - Lyman Phelps. Size of Satsumas. - Did not J. H. McF. (page 491) make a slip of the pen in his account of the size of the Satsumas ? An orange so small that 625 only a little more than filled half a box could not be much larger than a large hickory nut or a black walnut. The Satsuma, as I have seen it, averages larger than the Mandarin, which usually runs from 200 to 350 to the box. I do not think that I have ever seen a Satsuma smaller than 300 to the box, and most of them would run up to the neighborhood of 200 per box.

As to its hardiness, last spring's experience in Florida furnishes no criterion by which to estimate its true standing. No tree is hardy when in full vigor of growth, and every twig tipped with young tender growth. A few days after the frost of March 17, I was out in a large hammock near here. The tops of the hickories, sweet gum and other deciduous trees, which had just got well leaved out before the frost, looked as though a fire had swept through them. On my own place fig trees were killed almost to the ground by a temperature of 260, which only lasted part of one night, that went through the freeze of January, 1886, unhurt, when the ground froze, in the shade, for four days, and the mercury played up and down between 20 and 30 all that time ! As the Satsuma trees were growing vigorously at the time of the freeze in March, 1890, and covered with new tender growth, they could not possibly escape injury. Yet they suffered less than most varieties under similar conditions. - W. C. Steele, Florida.