Read Ebook: Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Eleventh Annual Meeting Washington D. C. October 7 and 8 1920 by Northern Nut Growers Association Editor

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The Rush chinquapin, and other large-fruited, tall growing varieties have also been used to some extent. The resulting hybrids make handsome trees of rapid growth and bear profuse crops of very attractive nuts, but are greatly injured by blight. As experience accumulated it was found that the extreme caution used in the earlier trials to keep out foreign pollen were scarcely needed and that merely covering the pistillate blooms as soon as they could be distinguished with cotton batting is all that is necessary, and also that hybrids may be produced with considerable certainty in open pollination if the tree or branch is kept entirely free from staminate tassels and the selected pollen is promptly applied as soon as the stigmas become receptive.

Quite a number of chance or self-pollinated seedlings from choice hybrids have been raised in the hope that their good qualities might be perpetuated and the trouble and expense of grafting largely obviated but, as with most other hybrids between distinct species, the seedlings lacked sufficient uniformity to be of especial value. A few individuals turned out superior to the parent but on the whole degeneracy, from the nut-producers standpoint, appears among seedlings of hybrid chestnuts.

In 1909 the unfruited chinquapin hybrids, 68 in number, were transferred to Arlington Farm, Virginia, and two years later Bell Experiment Plot was established near Glendale, Maryland, largely for the purpose of developing blight-resistant varieties of chestnuts as far as this can be done by breeding and testing of wild forms. There are now over 2000 hybrids and seedlings of species at Bell ranging from one to ten years of age. Of the original trees planted at Arlington about 20 remain. They have formed handsome trees twenty feet high with tops almost as wide in diameter and have borne many profuse crops of nuts mostly of good quality and from three to six times as large and heavy as those of the parent chinquapin. All have been attacked by blight, the most promising one only this spring, after thirteen years of resistance to this virulent disease. All the hybrids carrying blood of native or European chestnuts were quickly killed, but those with the Japanese species as a pollen parent are still growing vigorously and bearing well, though considerably disfigured by blight.

From the purely horticultural standpoint these hybrids between chinquapins and chestnut species must be considered as most striking successes. If this terribly destructive disease, probably the most virulent that afflicts any tree in the temperate climate, could be controlled there would be little need to look further for varieties suited for commercial and home culture, some of which can be as readily grown as peach trees and come into bearing as young. As the situation stands we must search further for individuals that combine good cropping capacity with practical disease-resistance.

Aside from its usefulness as a nut tree the value of our stand of native chestnuts, though already half destroyed, can scarcely be estimated. Every one knows the ease with which a healthy chestnut woodland reproduces itself by sprouts and the extreme value of its timber for posts, telegraph and telephone poles, for furniture and for tanning extracts, now made from both bark and wood. We scarcely have a forest tree as useful, but if some natural handicap, not yet in sight, does not stay the spread of the blight fungus, our much valued chestnuts appear to be doomed. A few small colonies of diseased, but living sweet chestnut trees, numbering scarcely fifty, have been located in New York City parks and neighboring localities in Long Island, carrying infection at least eighteen years old, where the accompanying stands have completely vanished. This affords the single ray of hope amid the otherwise complete destruction marking the spread of blight. In the hope that the marked resistance shown by these scarred veterans can be transmitted seedlings have been raised and scions established at Bell from the most promising individuals, and on this slender chance for perpetuating this prized species in its native habitat we must, for the present, rest content.

The breeding experiments at Bell must be regarded as about the only constructive attempt in existence to replace a most highly prized nut and timber that is being swept from the face of the earth. Unless unforseen natural conditions should stay the ravages of blight our chestnut stands will vanish, most likely within the view of the present generation. Although our progress in finding and developing blight-resistants is not as striking as might be hoped something has been accomplished, and the idea of salvaging useful nut and timber chestnuts from available material and developing better ones than now exist should not be abandoned.

THE PRESIDENT: Unless other action is desired this interesting paper will be received and recorded in the proceedings.

MR. T. P. LITTLEPAGE: Mr. President, Members of the Association. I will attempt in a few words to give you some suggestions about your afternoon rambles. There will be a special car assigned exclusively to the nut growers on the tracks at 14th St. and New York Avenue at 12:45, which will take you to Bell Station where you will see Dr. Van Fleet's roses and chestnut orchard. A short walk from there is the old place of Judge Gabriel Duvall, a former Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, member of Congress and a great friend of Thomas Jefferson. The unpublished manuscripts of Jefferson show that he took to Judge Duvall a bundle of "paccan" trees, as he called them. Jefferson was one of our great horticulturists and gave the first complete botanical classification of the pecan. Those three big trees that Jefferson gave Judge Duvall are growing out there today and from them are scores of other small trees. I was very much surprised when I read these notes of Jefferson and in looking through Washington's dairy about the same time I read where he said that Thomas Jefferson gave him a bundle of "paccan" trees. Now those of you who are to visit Mount Vernon on this trip look and you will find that three of the most beautiful trees there are pecan trees. Two of them this year have nuts on them one with a rather full crop and one with a light crop. They are undoubtedly the western or northern pecan. They show that in the character of the nuts and bark. When Jefferson was over in Paris he wrote to his friend Hopkins to send him a box of pecans and told him to send them in sand. Those of you who are going to Paris next summer look around and you may find some of Thomas Jefferson's pecan trees. It was perfectly apparent that he wanted those nuts for planting.

After visiting at Bell Station we will take the car up to my place where there really is not much to see. I have thirty acres there of northern pecan trees, twelve acres two years old and they run all the way up to six years of age. Most of the six-year old trees this year set pecans which dropped off about the middle of the summer. They were all full of catkins. One Busseron tree had fifty pecans on it and a number of Major and Butterick trees had pecans but I do not believe they stuck. I had a Stuart which had a sprinkling of pecans on it and they also fell off. I can show you how not to grow trees. Some of them had no care whatever and some had pretty fair care. You can see dead chestnut trees up there showing that the blight is as bad as Dr. Van Fleet says. We find where they stand in the woods for ten years surrounded by trees with the blight and do not blight and the next year die. So the fact that a tree stands in a nursery row and does not blight does not indicate anything. The only hope we have is the work Dr. Van Fleet is doing.

THE PRESIDENT: Upon the same subject we will be glad to hear from Professor Close.

PROFESSOR CLOSE: I will just take a few minutes in telling some of the things I have been trying to do at home. My work is necessarily on a very small scale. I am away from home so much of the time that some things I start I cannot follow through properly. In grafting, for instance, I get the grafting done as I can do it from time to time in the spring and then I have to leave on a Government trip and am not at home to take care of the growing grafts as I would like to be. While my extension work for the Government is primarily connected with fruit I look into nut work as much as possible. Dr. Van Fleet has given me a number of hybrid chinkapins and this year three of them have fruited for the first time, one being of fairly good size. I have a couple of Japan walnut trees and the surprising thing is that although they were planted in 1910 they are fruiting this year for the first time. Usually those trees begin bearing very early. They have grown rapidly, are probably twenty feet high and have a breadth of equal distance but have been disappointing in that they have been so late in fruiting.

MR. LITTLEPAGE. Do they winter-kill any?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: No, they have not winter-killed at all. One was supposed to be a heart nut but both are Sieboldianas. I think the most satisfactory and interesting thing I have is one of these large filberts or hazel nuts. It is a pretty good size for an eastern-grown nut. This is a seedling from New Jersey. I received the scions four years ago and was successful in having three or four of them live and last year they produced for the first time, three years from the graft. They are well filled and of pretty good quality. I have them grafted on some bushes of European type secured from a nursery about 1910, and which until grafted did not fruit at all. After the grafts began blooming last year these bushes have been producing nuts of small size. While the nuts are small they are right interesting.

In connection with the blight resistant chestnuts I will say that last Friday I visited Mr. John Killen of Felton, Delaware. Some of you know that Mr. Killen has been working with nuts for a good many years and has many very interesting things there. He finds that the blight has taken everything except his Japanese seedlings and here are specimens of two of the Japanese seedlings. This you see is a very large nut. I presume the tree must be twenty years old or more. It is productive and he says it is commercially successful, which means that it blights a little but not very seriously. He has another seedling, a smaller one, that is up to the present time absolutely blight proof. He has planted twenty-five or thirty pounds of these nuts for growing trees for sale and he believes that the seedling from this parent tree will be absolutely free from blight. You will be interested to know that up to the time I was there last Friday he had shipped seven hundred pounds of chestnuts and was receiving twenty-five cents a pound wholesale.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: What is the variety?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: They are all seedlings. In fact all of his varieties are dead. He has nothing but seedlings.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: Has that been called to Dr. Van Fleet's attention?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Not that I know of. I doubt if Dr. Van Fleet has seen this blight proof one. I will be glad to tell him about them when I have an opportunity. Mr. Killen has one Japan walnut tree that is interesting. It must be 25 or 30 years old. I do not know where he got it. One limb we measured extends out 36 feet. The limbs on the other side of the tree are not quite so long but the tree is nearly 70 feet in diameter. Two years ago he sold the crop for .00, and he thinks he will get more this year. He has contracted the crop to a nurseryman. Mr. Killen has quite a number of seedling Persian walnuts and some of them, perhaps all, blight more or less. He is very much exercised over the blight. He worries more over this than he does over the chestnut blight.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: Does the blight attack the nuts or the twigs?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Both but mostly it attacks the nuts. At Beltsville 4 miles north of College Park there is one of the best seedling walnuts I have run across. It fruits every year and sometimes a part of the crop is injured by blight.

MR. POMEROY: The husks turn black?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Yes.

MR. POMEROY: That is not blight; that is a fly injury

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Mr. Killen thinks that this year he partially controlled walnut blight with Bordeaux spray. One particular tree stands near where the spray tank was filled and one side of it was sprayed every time the spray rig passed it. The nuts from the sprayed side were really better than those from the other side.

Just below Dover, Delaware, at Woodside, I was at Mr. Sam Derby's place last Saturday and found something very valuable in the line of Persian walnuts, I think one of the best I have seen at all in the East. One particular tree was purchased for a Franquette but it is not. It probably is a Mayette seedling. Some of the men who tested the samples think this was one of the most desirable they had seen in the East. Mr. Derby bought about a dozen trees eight or nine years ago from some nurseryman. The trees are not alike in shape and size of nuts. They evidently are from the same bunch of seedlings but were sold for Franquette and Mayette. They are probably all Mayette seedlings.

Now, coming back to College Park, four years ago Mr. Littlepage was good enough to give me some pecan scions which I grafted into a seedling tree in a neighbor's chicken yard. The grafts practically all lived and last year, three years from the graft, about a dozen Major nuts were produced. These are probably the first Major pecans produced in Maryland. This year the Busseron and Major grafts bloomed but we had so many late frosts that the blossoms were killed and now there are only two Major nuts on the tree. My own trees are not old enough to bloom except one Mantura which bloomed this year but did not set fruit. I presume it was largely due to the late frosts.

In the fall of 1910 Professor Lake gave me some buds of Persian walnut and I put three buds into a young black walnut tree. During the following February we had a drop in temperature to 25 below zero, something almost unknown in this section of the country, but two of the buds lived through it. After growth started in the spring I cut one out and the other grew into a tree which produced three nuts in 1915. My area for nut trees is small so I am planting pecans, black and Persian walnuts, and hickory twenty feet apart with the idea of keeping them pruned. I have ten varieties of pecans and several of walnuts. Between these I have chinkapins and hazelnuts. There are eight or ten varieties of hazels and about sixty seedlings for grafting later on.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: Did the young pecan trees bloom.

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Only the Mantura and it must be about ten years old.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: What kind of bloom?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: Both kinds.

DR. MORRIS: Which hazels are these?

PROFESSOR CLOSE: They were undoubtedly European.

DR. MORRIS: I think that is a very important point. Some time ago I said that our wild hazel drove the cows out of the pasture. It is a worthless weed with us in Connecticut and it is an important thing for us to transform our hazel pasture lands that are full of thickets of this weed over into good bearing propositions. I grafted a lot of hazelnut bushes with European scions. There are Chinese hazelnut trees that grow to be more than a hundred feet in height and six feet in trunk diameter. The Jacquemont goes to one hundred feet, and the Colurna frequently grows to fifty feet. I believe it is going to be a very important matter to top work these large kinds of hazel trees which do not send runners out from the root and which are not inclined to send large suckers up from the stock. So the kind of stock upon which hazels are to be grafted is a very important matter for nurserymen. But we can also use the worthless pasture bushes profitably.

THE PRESIDENT: In order that we may keep the business of our program up to the minute we should complete the naming of the Nominating Committee. In order to quickly bring it about and in order that all may have a voice in the matter I would suggest that five be nominated from the floor for the positions, that the nominations then close and that the Secretary cast the ballot for the members of the nominating committee.

The names suggested were: Mr. Olcott, Mr. Littlepage, Dr. Morris, Mr. Reed and Professor Close.

The nominations closed and the Secretary cast the ballot for the above named persons.

THE PRESIDENT: We still have a few minutes and might take up the proposed changes in the constitution that were suggested at the Battle Creek meeting almost one year ago. I will request Mr. Bixby to state to you what the proposed changes are.

THE SECRETARY: At the meeting at Battle Creek last November notice was given for proposed changes in the constitution, as follows.

At this meeting it was voted that Article IV, OFFICERS, be presented to the members at the next meeting for the purpose of voting on a change to read:

There shall be a President, a Vice-President, a Treasurer and a Secretary, who shall be elected at the annual meeting; an Executive Committee of six persons of which the President, the last two retiring Presidents, Vice-President, Treasurer and Secretary shall be members. There shall be a state Vice-President from each state, dependency or country represented in the membership of the Association who shall be appointed by the President.

Ten members shall constitute a quorum but must include two of the four elected officers.

THE SECRETARY: I make a motion that the changes in the constitution as read be acted upon now.

PROFESSOR CLOSE: I second the motion.

MR. FOSTER: May I offer a suggestion in connection with the proposed change. It is relatively an immaterial one and I presume will be included. As a member here from the District of Columbia I think the District of Columbia should be included with the states.

THE SECRETARY: I think that has been done. Grouped among the states appears the District of Columbia.

THE ACTING SECRETARY: That is, you would have the words "District of Columbia" inserted in connection with state, dependency or country?

THE SECRETARY: I accept that.

The change in the constitution, as recommended, was carried.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: As we have another minute or two there is one matter that we might dispose of. There was a committee appointed once upon a time on incorporation. It was thought by some of the members that if this association were incorporated, making it thereby a perpetual, tangible organization, it might be to its advantage. There might be some man who would be good enough to bequeath some funds to the Association for investigational work. As we are just a voluntary organization without any particular responsibility, it was thought by some that an incorporation would be desirable. I was appointed as a member of the corporative committee. The committee consisted of Mr. Webber of Ohio, and I do not recall the other member but Mr. Webber and I had several conferences. It seems to me that perhaps the best and most feasible way would be to incorporate under the laws of the District of Columbia. The code of the District of Columbia provides for incorporations of this kind for educational, scientific and benevolent purposes at a very nominal expense. For commercial corporations they must, of course, have a capital stock and ten per cent of it must be paid in in cash, but there is no such requirement under the code of the District of Columbia for scientific and benevolent corporations. There is a provision in the code for an incorporation of this kind by having the proper articles drawn up, setting forth the purpose of the organization, its line of work and its membership, naming for the time being three trustees, two of which at that particular time must be residents of the District of Columbia, and filing those articles with the Recorder of Deeds. It is approved and that becomes the charter. The Association is then a body corporate with all of the rights and privileges of any other organization of that kind.

A great many organizations have been formed in the District of Columbia under that provision of the code. It seems to me about as simple and as comprehensive as any of the laws of any of the states, and about as free from any burdens or obligations of reports or matters of that kind. If it is the sense of this meeting, and I think you have quite a representative membership here, that this organization be so incorporated I shall take pleasure, after this meeting, in drafting proper papers, presenting them to some of the members for signature and perfecting a corporation.

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