. He was one of the half-dozen pioneer fruit-growers
of that region, and had noticed at the San Gabriel Mission how well
orange trees grew there. His wife and daughter waited in Washington,
D.C., until a home should be ready here for them, and they often sent
Mr. Tibbets plants and seeds from the Department of Agriculture. To
this Department and its gardens in Washington, many curious plants
are forwarded from other countries for growing and experiment in the
United States. New kinds of grain or fruits are carefully cultivated
and watched by the Department, and from it farmers can always get
seeds or cuttings to try on their own farms.

Mrs. Tibbets often visited the Department gardens, and in 1873 she
wrote to her husband that she could get him some fine orange trees if
he would promise the government to take great care of them and to keep
them apart from other trees till they fruited. Of course he agreed to
give them special attention, and therefore that December he received
three small, rooted orange trees. A cow chewed up one of these, but
for five years the others were watched and tended. Then sweet white
blossoms appeared on each little tree, and afterwards two oranges,
like hard green bullets at first. Finally, in January, 1879, Mr.
Tibbets picked four large, well-flavored, golden oranges, the first
seedless ones ever grown outside of Brazil.

From the hot swamps of the tropical country at Bahia the United States
Consul had sent six cuttings of this peculiar orange to be planted
in the Washington gardens. All died but the two at Riverside. In 1880
they bore half a bushel of fruit, and the new seedless oranges were
talked of throughout Southern California. The other orange growers
had been cultivating "seedlings," trees which bore smaller fruit, with
many bitter seeds and a thick skin. Many of these growers now cut back
their seedlings to bare limbs, and grafted the new orange on these
branches. This is called "budding," and is done by cutting off a thin
slip of bark with a tiny folded-up leaf-bud on it, inserting the graft
in the branch to be budded and securing it there with wax to keep the
air out. The little bud drinks in sap from the tree stem, and grows
and blossoms true to its own mother tree.

There were few orange groves then, but soon nearly all were budded
to the new kind, seventy-five acres being so changed on the Baldwin
Ranch; and when these trees began to bear, some five years afterwards,
people