: 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 - Northern Nut Growers Association Periodicals; Nut trees Periodicals; Nuts Periodic

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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?

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