Hi, Stephanie,

I"ve looked at several cite on the web and this appears to be the conscensus.


[www.twinleaf.org]

Although peaches were commonly grown in Old World gardens and orchards, spreading from Asia on the tides of civilization, most European explorers mistakenly thought the peach was an indigenous American product. From Pennsylvania south, peach trees merged into the surrounding vegetation so completely that the earliest natural historians, even John Bartram, America's first great botanist, assumed the peach was a native tree. In fact, the peach was introduced either by the Spanish settlers in St. Augustine, Florida in 1565 or by the French to an isolated Gulf of Mexico settlement in 1562. It was probably grown in Mexico at an even earlier date. Native American peach culture migrated north with the travels of Jesuit and Franciscan missionaries and with the Native Americans themselves. At the same time, the cultivated trees escaped into the landscape. William Penn observed wild, Indian peaches as far north as Philadelphia in 1683, and a few years later John Banister wrote that, in Virginia, "Peaches and Nectarines I believe to be Spontaneous ... for the Indians have, and ever had greater variety, and finer sorts of them than we ..." Luigi Castiglioni noted in 1787 that, "Peach trees are so abundant in Virginia that often, upon cutting away a pine wood ... they cover the whole terrain." It seems odd that today there is no place where peach trees dominate "the whole terrain" in Virginia, although they are reported as relatively uncommon in about half of its counties."

Lee