In temperate Oceanica the peach plays as important a part in horticulture as any other of the deciduous tree-fruits. In early days in New Zealand, "vast groves of peaches existed, sometimes, as in the Waikato, extending for miles, where magnificently grown trees cropped without limit."[152] Both the peach and nectarine are grown in the horticultural regions of the island. Wherever the fruits of temperate climates are cultivated in Australia, there may the peach be found. If one may judge from the attention given this fruit in the agricultural literature of New Zealand and Australia, it holds the same high place in the horticulture of these islands in the Pacific that it has in Europe and America. The types of peaches are almost as diverse as the regions in which the fruit is an inhabitant. The 2181 varieties described in _The Peaches of New York_ attest the variability of the species in America and Europe, many of our sorts having come from the Old World. This great number of kinds can be distinguished by reason of differences in skin, flesh, flavor, aroma, stone and season, the attributes of which have been mentioned several times in foregoing paragraphs. The structure of leaf and tree offers as many more taxonomic characters. It is interesting to note the extreme forms in fruit and tree the peach has taken on in its centuries of world-wide wanderings. Round, flat, beaked, free or clingstone peaches with smooth or downy skins and red, yellow or white flesh, sweet, sour or bitter, in all combinations, and each often modified by soil and climate, are known to American growers of this fruit. But there are many peaches with less well-known characters. Thus, a peach in China bears fruits as heavy as one pound apiece with extraordinary keeping and shipping qualities;[153] another Chinese peach of the Honey type has a tree with a maximum height of only seven or eight feet;[154] growing in the same locality, Poliping, China, is a variety with extraordinarily long leaves;[155] the _Paak wat to_ peach from China is a white-stoned sort;[156] a variety in the French West Indies has fruits that peel easily and withstand a continuous temperature in ripening season of 76 to 90 degrees;[157] from Kashgar comes a peach that will keep for several months;[158] in Chinese Turkestan there is a nectarine "said to keep for several weeks after fully ripe;"[159] even more remarkable is the Feitcheng peach which ripens in late September and can be kept, if wrapped in paper, until February;[160] as remarkable as any is the Transvaal Yellow of South Africa which we have seen in a foregoing paragraph grows "amongst granite boulders," "as a hedge around homesteads" and "beside water furrows and dams, the roots of one side of the tree immersed in water;" the Fragrant Peach and the Firm Peach from China are not yet known in America;[161] another Chinese peach is a dwarf, "grown in pots indoors, which fruits at a height of fifteen