A LONG time ago, maybe even 100 years ago, a very clever man who was curious about many things was reading National Geographic magazine. You have probably enjoyed looking at National Geographic. Back then, though, the magazine didn't have all those beautiful color pictures. In the magazine, the man read about a certain kind of raspberry plant that grew only in Japan and some parts of China. The ripe berries of this plant were a bright clear red and had a wonderful flavor. This man decided he would like to have some of these unusual berries growing near his home in Washington Grove. So he ordered the berry plants from a catalog company which shipped them here from Japan. They were called "wineberries."
He planted the wineberries somewhere in town. Who knows where? He lived in a beautiful house at 202 Grove Ave, where a little brick house now stands. But he owned a lot of the other land in town too.
The man's name was Major Samuel Hamilton Walker (Caryline Kelly is his great-great-granddaughter) and those wineberries that he ordered from Japan now grow all over town. How do you think they spread so far? The birds and the bees helped!
Mockingbirds, orioles, catbirds and lots of other birds love berries. When they ate Major Walker's wineberries and then flew to a tree branch to sit, their droppings fell on the ground below and in them were seeds to grow new wineberry plants! This is how the wineberries "escaped" from the Major's garden. (Have you ever noticed that a new little sprout of poison ivy has appeared in your yard where there had never been any before? The birds are fond of poison ivy berries too!)
How did the bees help? When a bee visits a flower to get nectar, the yellow dusty pollen from the center of the flower sticks to the bee's fuzzy back legs. Now if some of that pollen dust brushes off onto ANOTHER raspberry flower, that flower will be able to make a berry. And the seeds in that berry can make a new berry plant, of course.
But the magical thing is that that new berry plant might look like the one that the its seed came from, OR it might look like the plant that the bee brought the pollen from, OR it might look a bit like both plants. Just like you probably look a bit like both your mom and your dad.
The wineberry plants that Major Walker ordered from Japan had larger, longer stems (or "canes") than the raspberries that already grew wild around here. These long canes were VERY fuzzy with tiny reddish-orange hairs.
Look around. You will find that some of the red raspberries in our woods grow on plain green stems that are smooth (except for the thorns!). These are probably most like the plants that always grew here. Others are thick-stemmed and very hairy. These are most like the plants Major Walker grew. But many more are just a little bit hairy. The bees, as they busily collect nectar, have spread pollen from one kind of raspberry flower to another. And the seeds from the berries that formed grew a new kind of plant, a bit like a Japanese raspberry and a bit like a Maryland raspberry.
The wineberries are not the only gift Major Walker brought to our woods. One of many ideas he became excited about was damming a spring-fed stream in the woods to create a lake. He thought that in winter, when the lake froze, the men in town could cut the ice, carry it in horse-drawn wagons to a storehouse (where the post office is now) and in summer, sell it to people to use in their ice chests all summer. That was before you could buy electric refrigerators, of course. They tried his idea. It only worked well the first year, when they really did get a lot of ice, but that is how our wonderful Maple Lake happens to be there in the woods.
This July, when you stop to pick berries on the way to your swim class, will you be thinking of Major Walker who brought the berries and the lake to Washington Grove?