Part 2

I have a number of hybrids between chinquapins and various species and varieties of other chestnuts, but none of these as yet has produced nuts of marked value. There seems to be a tendency for the coarseness of the larger nuts to prevail in the hybrids, a certain loss of gentility beneath a showy exterior.

The next branch which I present for inspection is from a most beautiful member of the chestnut family, the alder-leaved chestnut (_Castanea alnifolia_). It is classed among the chinquapins in Georgia where the plant is nearly if not quite evergreen. At Stamford it is deciduous very late in the autumn, but sometimes a green leaf will be found in February, where snow or dead leaves on the ground have furnished a protecting covering. The notable value of this species is perhaps in its decorative character for lawns, although the nuts are first rate. The dark green brilliant leaves are striking in appearance, and the shrub is inclined toward a trailing habit, much like that of some of the junipers. This species is one of my pets at Merribrooke, and a perennial source of wonder that nurserymen have not as yet pounced upon it for purposes of exaggeration and misstatement in their annual catalogues.

All of these specimens shown today are from my country place at Stamford, Connecticut, where the mercury in the thermometer leads one to make quotations relating to the Eve of Saint Agnes; five or ten degrees below the zero of Fahrenheit occasionally, and once down to twenty degrees below without injury to any kind of chestnut so far as I could observe.

I cannot make an exhibit of the golden-leaved chinquapin, from the Pacific slope, because tragedy came to all of my little trees of this species, and like most of the Pacific slope plants they are not very joyous in the east. One lot lived through one winter at Merribrooke, but they were the first green things that my cows saw in the springtime, and further comment would be surplus. A single specimen took courage in its root and grew finely until autumn, but it was near a path and somebody pulled it up and left it lying stark naked on the ground. Botanists have recently made two species of the golden-leaved chinquapin, one of the species attaining a height of more than one hundred feet. If horticulturists will secure specimens of _Castanopsis chrysophilla_ from the region of Mount Shasta in California I presume that this beautiful evergreen chinquapin may be taught to grow in some of our gardens. It is cultivated in the gardens of temperate Europe. In our north it should be planted close to a running brook, where the roots of young trees can carry water in plenty to the evergreen top while the ground is frozen hard in winter.

Our common chinquapin of the east is perhaps the one that will be cultivated most profitably in the region between the Rocky Mountains and the Atlantic coast. The beauty of freshly picked bush chinquapin nuts is not rivalled by that of any other kind of nut that I have ever seen. The exquisitely polished mahogany color comes out of a light downy cloud near the apex of the nut, dark as midnight for a moment and then shading through glows of lively chestnut until it dawns in a dreamy cream color at the base, with just enough suggestion of green to temper the reds.

If any gourmet with a color soul could serve each one of his friends to a plate of twenty freshly picked bush chinquapins along with two Bennett persimmons, and all resting upon late September leaves of tupelo or of sweet gum the friends would remain and live at his expense while the combination lasted.

Furthermore, the children must always be taken into consideration along with chinquapin questions. According to authorities on the subject of decadence, we do not care very much about the children in these days. If some old-fashioned folks still remain, and if these old-fashioned folks do not take any particular personal interest in the beautiful garden and lawn trees that America has held out towards us in the chinquapins, they may at least plant a few of them because of the social standing that will follow. How so? Well, you see, it's because the parents of elite children will run over for a little visit in order to find out why the children do not come home. Then again, we are kind to dumb animals when raising chinquapins. Squirrels and white-footed mice, crows and blue jays are full of enthusiasm for the nuts, and they will assume the responsibility of gathering the crop if the matter is left in their charge.

This is really a funny country; something of a joke of a country when you come to think of it. Instead of setting out trees that will become both useful and beautiful, in accordance with the old Greek ideal of combining beauty and utility we set out Norway spruces that will make people hate evergreens in general. We set out poplars and all sorts of bunches of leaves in our parks and along the highways, instead of trees still more beautiful that would yield tons of coupon dollars every autumn. _De gustibus non est disputandum!_

When experimenting with hybridization of chinquapins, I ran across a phenomenon of new interest to botanists, and quite accidentally. A number of clusters of pistillate flowers of the bush chinquapin had been covered with paper bags, but not pollenized because of a shortage of pollen. An active man with a good sense of neatness and order would have removed those bags merely for the sake of appearance, but I was lazy and allowed the bags to remain for two or three weeks. When they were finally removed, it was found that the branches had set quite full of fruit, although not so full as other branches that had been pollenized from oaks. We were evidently dealing with an instance of parthenogenesis. The flowers that had received oak pollen did not show any oak parentage later in their progeny, and it was observed in other experiments in other years that almost any cupuliferous pollen would start cells of the chinquapin ovary into division and into the development of fertile nuts, but without inclusion of the pollen cell in a gamete. For purposes of convenience in thinking I have temporarily called this phenomenon "stereochemic parthenogenesis." Apparently the propinquity of foreign pollen serves to stimulate a female cell into division, although the pollen cell retains fixed molecular identity, and does not fuse with the female cell. I need not bring up abstruse questions of chromatin or of subatomic influence here.

At Stamford the bush chinquapins begin to blossom regularly about the twelfth of June, irrespective of weather conditions. The tree chinquapins blossom a little later, but the alder-leaved chestnut may not blossom until July, later than the common American chestnut. The bush chinquapins begin to open their burs very regularly about the fifteenth of September; earlier than any other chestnuts. They bear at an early age, sometimes in their fifth summer.

Grafting and budding is easily done among all of the chestnuts as a rule, and this year I employed for the first time a large chinquapin bush for top-working with the choice Merribrooke variety of the common chestnut. Every one of the grafts caught, and some of them have grown tremendously. This introduces an interesting question. May we graft the common American chestnut upon bush chinquapin stocks and secure precocious bearing? In that case we shall have trees like the dwarf apple and pear trees that are readily pruned and sprayed.

The chinquapin is practically immune to the blight (_Endothia parasitica_.) Easily blighting varieties of choice American chestnuts may be grafted upon these blight resistant stocks in orchard form if my experiment proves to be a success. It will not lessen the vulnerability of the American chestnut, but dwarf trees will be within reach of the horticulturist's pruning knife and spray outfit. Orchards of fine varieties of the common chestnut may perhaps be maintained in this way until the present epidemic of Endothia has expended its protoplasmic energy, or until it has succumbed to microbic parasites of its own.

THE PRESIDENT: Are there any questions to put to Dr. Morris?

THE SECRETARY: I venture to say that a good many people have tried, in the north, to raise the chinquapin, and I would like to have Dr. Morris tell us what to do to get it to grow best, whether to buy the trees from the nurserymen, or to plant the nuts, and just how to do it.

PROF. C. P. CLOSE: I would like to ask Dr. Morris about those chinquapins that set without the application of pollen, whether they fill well and whether they sprout at planting?

MR. LITTLEPAGE: With us out in Maryland it isn't a question of producing the chinquapin; we cut the bushes down every year by the thousands; we have nothing at all against it, but we have found that the weevil has been absolutely unsurmountable with us. It is the only discouraging thing about it in this part of the country. Around Washington the chinquapin is a weed tree, and if you gather a peck of chinquapins you will find that the whole peck, in two weeks, have turned to weevils. Perhaps Dr. Morris can tell us what to do about that, and put us on the road to success.

THE PRESIDENT: I should like to ask Dr. Morris two questions, first, as to the possibility of utilizing the western tree chinquapins as stocks for the larger eastern chinquapins with nuts of chestnut size. Is there a possibility thus of getting a larger tree?

The second question is akin to that--utilization of the western tree as a stock for a hybrid chinquapin which might have arboreal possibilities and enough chinquapin qualities to be blight-resistant.

DR. STABLER: I am very much interested in Dr. Morris' proposition to produce dwarf chestnut trees by grafting on chinquapin stocks. Now, the difficulty I would expect to encounter is the same as when pecans are grafted on hickory, and when sweet cherries are grafted on Mahaleb, namely, that the root is not sufficiently vigorous to support the top. The fact that his grafts grew so tremendously when put on the chinquapin roots would look as though that might occur.

THE PRESIDENT: The audience seems to have run out of questions.

DR. MORRIS: All right, sir. First, how are we to grow chinquapins? Plant as soon as the nuts have fallen. Put them in a cage. I have wire cages that are about eight inches high, and about two feet wide and three feet long. I plant all the nuts there. They have wire mesh tops to keep out the rodents; that is the important thing. All nuts, I find, are best planted under conditions which simulate the normal conditions. Our nut trees are not as yet domesticated. They haven't learned bad habits, and they depend upon peculiarly favorable conditions of moisture, warmth and light. You plant a nut two inches below the surface, but nature doesn't do anything like that. Consequently, that nut is surprised, doesn't know what to do, and stays down there looking for something to happen. But if you put that nut so it is about half buried in the sand, so that it is damp on one side and the sun strikes it on the other side, and the frost and snow affect it naturally, the nut does just what you want it to do. It gets out of that uncomfortable condition and begins to grow. (Laughter.) When planting any nuts, I place them in the sand and leave one side exposed to light, moisture, frost, and the observation of visitors. When I have sprouted chinquapins in the north and there is danger of their not lignifying when the ground begins to freeze, I put a lot of little sticks upright amongst them, so that my mulch will not bear too heavily upon the chinquapins, and then cover them with several inches of oak leaves, or any good, strong leaves that will not pack too tightly. That mulch of loose leaves will protect the sprouted nuts perfectly during the winter in Connecticut, so they all start growing in the next spring.

Another way is to buy chinquapin stocks from any of the nurserymen, stocks two or three years old, which begin to bear when four or five years of age.

Professor Close, I think it was, who asked if the nuts were fertile, both the ones that developed without fertilization by any pollen and the ones that developed by stereochemic parthenogenesis--by the influence of neighboring pollen. Both sorts are fertile, and I presume that the effect of that would be similar to the effect of close inbreeding. In other words, we would have intensification of characteristics of some one parent. If you get parthenogenesis through two or three generations I presume that same peculiar feature of the original parent would become so intensified as to become a marked feature of the progeny. This offers a new line of cleavage for horticultural investigation. I am very glad that you raised that question.

Answering Mr. Littlepage, I have apparently managed to get some crosses back and forth between chestnuts, and oaks, and beech, this year. I have a number of those crosses now under way that are apparently good hybrids.

DR. STABLER: A cross between a chestnut and a beech?

DR. MORRIS: Yes, I think so. You see, I have got to wait a year or so until the plants develop later characteristics. All of these parent trees are pretty closely related, you see. The blooming period between the different ones may be as much as two or three weeks, or three months apart, in fact. I have cross pollinated hazels and oaks, this year. The way to do that is to find correspondents at the extreme limit of the blossoming range of the species, who will send pollen. For instance, Professor Hume, in Florida, sends me chestnut pollen in time to cross my oaks, and Professor Conser, of the University of Maine, has some beeches that blossom in time for me to cross with chinquapins and oak trees. That is one way to do it.

Another way is to put your pollen in cold storage with some sphagnum moss, just put a little damp moss in your box with the pollen and put it in cold storage, and keep it at just about forty, above the freezing point. Another way is to put branches with dormant flower buds in cold storage. Hazels, for instance, may be kept for six months in this way. Put them in water, in the sun, and you soon have flowers furnishing pollen. I would take up the whole session of two days here if you were to ask too many questions along that line. (Laughter.)

Mr. Littlepage's question about the weevils. The question may be settled very easily where there are not many chinquapin trees. That is the case in Connecticut. Collect all the nuts, and you collect all of the weevil larvae. Curiously enough, the common chestnut weevil, that had become very abundant, has disappeared locally with the disappearance of our American chestnut, and has not attacked our chinquapins. If you have an orchard of chinquapins and collect all the nuts you will soon dispose of the weevils. That is the only way that I know of for disposing of the weevils. Eat them up. (Laughter.) You can pick out the weevil chestnuts fairly well if you toss all of the nuts into a cup of water and pick out the ones that float. Pound them up with a mallet and throw them into the chicken coop.

Dr. Smith asks if the use of the tree chinquapin as a stock for the American chestnut would give good-sized trees. Undoubtedly, and, besides that, if it is used for hybridizing purposes, we shall probably find that we have, now and then, an individual that is very much larger than the American chestnut or the tree chinquapin. It is a peculiarity of hybrids to show eccentricities, and many hybrids that occur are very thrifty and larger than either parent. That is the case with the Royal walnut that they have said so much about in California. It grows so rapidly there that even Californians do not dare to tell about it. (Laughter.)

Another question, the last one--will the effect of using a bush chinquapin stock for the American chestnut be like that of growing sour cherries upon stocks which do not carry them well? Now, we have there what the lawyers call "a question of fact," and we shall have to work that out. Some tops will exhaust a root. Some tops will grab a root by the back of the neck and drag it right along. Some tops will adjust themselves philosophically to almost any sort of unusual conditions, and go on and bear fruit like true philosophers. We have an instance of that in the dwarf apple, which is a success. We have an instance of failure in some of the cherries which exhaust themselves. We have an example of dragging the smaller stock along when we graft the Royal walnut upon the common black walnut. The Royal walnut just drags the black walnut along where it doesn't want to go at all. So there we have three instances of grafting a foreign visitor upon another stock.

I have taken more than my share of time, Mr. Chairman, but the discussion has been very interesting, indeed. (Applause.)

THE PRESIDENT: I am going to take the liberty of asking Dr. Morris one more question, which, perhaps, is of interest to others. In your experience with the golden-leafed chinquapins, from how far South have you secured stock, and how far North will the golden-leafed chinquapin grow?

DR. MORRIS: My specimens I got from a dealer in Portland, Oregon, and they grew pretty far North. The tree ranges from Oregon and Washington down through the lower extremities of the Coast range, but we had better get the northern forms, and there is one man, Carl Purdy, of Ukiah, California, who has the golden chinquapin for sale.

THE PRESIDENT: The next subject on the programme is the American black walnut. We have sent to the membership a series of questions about the black walnut which I will read for the benefit of those who haven't this programme.

First. What evidence is there to show that the black walnut may become a valuable nut commercially?

Second. Is quality important with the black walnut, and is there much difference in the quality of different nuts?

Third. What varieties of black walnut are most promising?

Fourth. Is the Thomas black walnut better than many others that have been brought to notice?

Fifth. What are the best methods of propagating?

Now, we have no set paper on that subject. I will call on ex-President Littlepage to make a few sallies concerning the black walnut.

MR. LITTLEPAGE: Mr. President, the black walnut ought to be the easiest subject in the world to talk about. It is a question of how much one ought not to say, however, in a limited time. The pecan tree was my first love. I shall always stick to the pecan. But if I were called upon today, to point out to this Association or to any prospective grower who actually wants to make money raising nuts, and who wants something that will pay the grocery bill and his sixty or ninety day notes, I think I should tell them to plant the black walnut. And I don't think, either, that that is treason, because I think, as we go through with this programme, the pecan will be properly taken care of.

In the first place, the black walnut is a native tree. I have seen it growing, too, on the Gulf of Mexico, and in the Dominion of Canada. Most native trees are immune to fungous and bacterial diseases that destroy so many trees. The black walnut is a hardy tree, and a fine timber proposition. In the second place, it is a fast growing tree. I don't knew just how quickly one could actually produce a black walnut orchard, but, outside of a few trees, such as the black locust and a number of others that do not produce nuts, the black walnut is one of the fastest growers. If you will feed a young walnut tree a small application of wood ashes and some stable manure it will commonly make a growth of six or seven feet a year. Therefore, you don't have to wait a long time for walnut trees to come into bearing.

It is easy to propagate the black walnut. Cleft grafting is one of the simplest methods in the spring. Dormant wood, cut in February or March and put in cold storage, and cleft grafted in the spring, ought to give from sixty to seventy per cent of success. I haven't had experience budding, but those who have say it is easy. Mr. Roper says it is, but grafting is easy and simple. The walnut, like other nut trees, must be propagated by budding or grafting in order to come true. It will not come true from seed.

Up until a few years ago I seldom saw a whole half of a black walnut. The ordinary black walnut cracks about like this (showing picture). Here is a black walnut cracked with two halves, and you can't even see the kernel. The two upper pictures show very beautiful walnuts, but they defy you to get out a whole kernel.

Now, then, when you come to a black walnut like this (showing picture), where you can crack out anywhere from fifty to seventy-five per cent of whole halves, and many entirely whole kernels, the most important problem is solved, and the black walnut has come into the competition.