These several references to plums show that this fruit was at least tried in early colonial times, but it was not until after the establishment of fruit-growing as an industry that any extensive plantings were made. Pomology really began in America, though it languished for the first half-century, at Flushing, Long Island, about 1730 with the establishment of a commercial nursery by Robert Prince, first of four proprietors. Just when this nursery, afterwards the famous Linnaean Botanic Garden, began to offer plums cannot be said, but in 1767 one of their advertisements shows that they were selling plum trees. As a possible indication that the fruit was not highly esteemed at this period, an advertisement of trees for sale from this nursery in the _New York Mercury_ of March 14th, 1774, does not offer plums. But in 1794 the catalog of the nursery offers plums in variety. Indeed, as we shall see, William Prince had at this time taken hold of the propagation and improvement of the Domestica plums with great earnestness. William Prince, third proprietor of the nursery founded by his grandfather says in his _Treatise of Horticulture_,[22] “that his father, about the year 1790 planted the pits of twenty-five quarts of Green Gage plums; these produced trees yielding fruit of every color; and the White Gage [Prince’s Imperial Gage], Red Gage and Prince’s Gage, now so well known, form part of the progeny of these plums, and there seems strong presumptive evidence to suppose that the Washington Plum was one of the same collection.” In 1828 the Prince nursery was offering for sale one hundred and forty varieties of plums which William Prince states[23] “are a selection only of the choicest kinds, in making which, the commoner fruits have been altogether rejected.” Of the kinds grown, there were over twenty thousand trees.[24] To this nursery, to William Prince and to William Robert Prince,[25] the fourth proprietor in particular, belong the credit of having given plum-growing its greatest impetus in America.