Part 17

Other varieties were tested by Mr. Jones, but he pushed none of them, rightly thinking that 4 leaders were as many as a nursery could afford to carry. He insisted that a new variety would have to prove its superiority before he would insert it in his catalog. Among other varieties was the Peanut from southern Ohio, the nut of which had single lobes; but apparently there was some mistake along the line, as nuts from grafted trees were indifferent and had 2 half kernels. He also had Creitz from Indiana, which Mr. H. F. Stoke, 1436 Watts Avenue, Roanoke, Va., thinks well of at this time. It was a prize winner in the 1926 contest of the NNGA. Neither Creitz nor Peanut was a Jones introduction.

+His Work with Hickories+

Among the hickories, there was the Stanley from Indiana in 1916, which was quite a favorite with Mr. Jones for some time. But did any one ever see a shellbark that bore well and filled the nuts? Shellbark trees are beautiful to look at, have enormous leaves, seven to nine leaflets, but they leaf out early in spring and the flowers are frequently killed back by spring frosts. Part of its flowers are killed outright with too great frequency for it to be worth growing for the nuts. These are very large, the hulls split entirely to the base, and what kernel there is, is of sugar-like sweetness. The shells are mostly thick and the kernels seldom well-filled.

The Glover shagbark hickory, from Connecticut, which was introduced by Mr. Jones in 1918, is undoubtedly one of the best shagbarks yet propagated. The nuts are of medium size and shell thickness. The flavor is very good. Most shagbarks have five leaflets; this one has seven quite as often, and the leaf is about a foot long.

There were other hybrids, or what are supposed to be hybrids. The Pleas hickory, introduced in 1916, was perhaps first successfully grafted by Mr. Jones, but credit for introduction went to the owner of the parent tree, Dr. E. Pleas, Collinsville, Oklahoma. It was a beautiful tree, shapely, with an air of considerable refinement, making it a graceful lawn tree. It bore fairly well, although not heavily. The nuts were thin-shelled and also had thin hulls that split entirely to the base. So far as most laymen are concerned, the Pleas may be but an edible, or semi-edible bitternut. On the grounds of the Plant Industry Station, at Beltsville, Md., there were once two trees of Pleas, but they were given to the Wild Life Service for planting 10 miles away, although there are many native bitternut trees just over the line fence in neighboring woods. We fancied that we could detect bitternut flavor in good shagbarks about the plantings, due to xenia influence, as in the case of chestnuts.

Burlington was another hican first propagated by Mr. Jones, in 1915. It came from eastern Iowa, and for a time was confused with Marquardt, which never was propagated, or apparently not. Burlington makes a fine appearing tree and serves well for ornamental purposes. It bears fairly well while young, but soon develops faulty nuts, few being well-filled and the majority weevil infested. It is also subject to shuck-worm and twig girdler injury.

Mr. Jones once wrote that he had given up with the hickories "in disgust." So far as is known, he never used any stock for hickories other than pecan, which grew well, made good unions and generally outgrew the scions. John Hershey, however, says this is not a good combination, but there are too many trees of Jones' propagation about the country, to accept Hershey's verdict altogether. Carl Weschcke[23], of St. Paul, uses bitternut largely or entirely; if it is a mistake, it will be expensive. Hickories are slow to grow and one gets too few nuts at best. It takes a lifetime to get even small crops, and for our part, we want no bitternuts on the place. Too often shagbarks fail to unite with bitternut and frequently they are short-lived.

In 1916 Mr. Jones propagated and introduced the Beaver hickory, from central Pennsylvania, a supposed bitternut-shagbark cross. It proved of little value and soon disappeared. The Fairbanks from northeast Iowa, a similar cross, was introduced the same year. It was one of the prettiest of all hybrids and stood up about the longest, but it had too much bitterness in the pellicle encasing the kernel and was much subject to weevil injury.

+Efforts with Persian Walnuts+

Many varieties of Persian (English) walnut were propagated and brought into bearing. Mr. Jones included a majority of the varieties brought into the country from France by Felix Gillet, of Nevada City, Calif., as early as 1870. There were Franquette, Mayette, Meylan, Parisienne, and a cutleaf variety which appears to have had no other name. A California variety of which he thought well for a number of years was Eureka, a western introduction of 1908. He propagated a number of eastern varieties such as Lancaster (Alpine) in 1913, although credit went to Mr. Rush; Boston, from Massachusetts, also in 1913; Ontario, from Canada, in 1914; and probably others. He obtained Chinese walnuts, from P. Wang, Kinsan Arboretum, Shanghai, and sold seedlings at wholesale. These were an Asiatic form of _Juglans regia_. He limed the soil, and thought the effects were beneficial. In this he was warmly supported by T. P. Littlepage and more recently by growers in Northern Ohio; but lately liming has not been found beneficial in Italy. All in all, however, the Persian walnut was not particularly dependable, and during the last few years the nursery which he left discontinued selling Persian walnut trees. In the East, the trees of older varieties usually were little more than interesting novelties.

+He Tried the Chinese Chestnut+

The Chinese chestnut was tried for a few years; but as so often happens with this species, nursery trees died badly in winter and Mr. Jones thought it due to blight, a disease which was then sweeping his part of the country, taking its mortal toll of both American and European species. However, blight does not seriously attack young trees and it is more likely that death was caused by a combination of summer drouth and winter cold; but no matter, the trees perished and the result was the same.

+First Heartnut Grafts+

Mr. Jones tried the butternut and there is still one tree in the experimental planting east of the residence. It is Aiken, from New England, and was first propagated by him in 1918. It proved disappointing. He grafted the first heartnut ever grafted of any kind insofar as is known, the Lancaster, in 1918. The only other heartnut for which he received full credit for first propagation was Faust, obtained from a dentist, Dr. 0. D. Faust, Bamberg, S. C., in 1918. Others that he was doubtless first to propagate, but for which credit went to the owners of the parent trees, were Bates and Stranger in 1919, both from R. Bates, Jackson, Aiken County, S. C., and Ritchie, a Virginia variety found by John W. Ritchie of Flemington, N. J., in 1918.

However, heartnuts are seldom heavy bearers and the trees do not grow large or live long. In Japan the wood is sometimes used for gunstocks but only because better material is unavailable. Heartnuts have practically no market where other kinds of nuts can be had and the trees are much subject to "bunch" disease. To an enormous extent the trees have been sold to unsuspecting people of the South and East as "English" walnuts.

[Footnote 23: See Weschcke's paper, elsewhere in this report.--Ed.]

+The Filbert+

Mr. Jones had a tree or two of the Turkish filbert, a species sometimes reaching a height of 60 feet and attaining a trunk diameter of three feet or more. Bixby found the species hardy in central New Hampshire. Mr. Jones obtained his seed from three trees in Highland Park, Rochester, New York, which are believed to be the oldest in the country. In some years, the Rochester trees bear freely, while in others there is not a nut. This is a valuable ornamental species, as it is green from early spring till the last thing in fall; specimens must be selected for such use, as often the trees are unshapely. Like all filberts, they are subject to Japanese beetle attack and must be sprayed or otherwise protected in beetle infested zones. Filbert foliage may be destroyed by these insects as many as three times in a summer and the trees die down to the ground. The nuts are too small to be of value; but the wood is white, very hard, and makes good turned articles.

+His Greatest Contribution+

It was with the filbert that Mr. Jones made his greatest contribution to nut culture. In 1917 he tried crossing European varieties with pollen of the native Rush. There were no results, and he tried again in 1918 with no better luck. In 1919 he reversed the order of crossing and nearly every nut set. He had discovered that native pollen was not effective on European stigmas, but that the reciprocal cross worked. By 1924 he had a fine lot of fruiting plants. The great majority were of no value, but his No. 200 apparently was well worth while. It was named Bixby in 1937, four years after another seedling, No. 91, had been named Buchanan. The explanation of this belated selection is that the soil about the Bixby tree had so eroded that the tree was starved for a time; but with a couple of years of heavy application of stable manure, it came back, so much so that it is now considered the better of the two. Both are rather small as compared with the large filberts of the Pacific Northwest; but when fully mature, they are sweet and agreeable.

After Mr. Jones was gone, the place was managed by his daughter, Miss Mildred Jones. She kept plants of her father's filbert varieties and the best of the crosses. The latter are now called the Mildred filberts, a name applied in _Standardized Plant Names_ to the entire group of crosses between Rush American and any European filbert. Mr. Jones hoped to have these called after himself but there was an old variety of Jones "hazel" and so his own name could not be used. He once sent specimens to Dr. C. S. Sargent of Arnold Arboretum and somehow gained the impression that the name Jones was given to the cross. Later, however, Sargent's successor, Mr. Alfred Rehder wrote that Sargent had not used the name in either correspondence or on specimens placed in the herbarium.

The example of Mr. Jones in breeding filberts has since been followed by others, as the Department of Agriculture, the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station at Geneva, and. Mr. Carl Weschcke of St. Paul, Minnesota. The last has copyrighted his crosses under the designation "hazilbert," which is a good name; but with the issue of _Standardized Plant Names_ in 1942, the name "hazel" was dropped for all members of the family. For a time, an effort was made to distinguish between the two by calling small-fruited ones "hazels" and those with large fruits "filberts," but there is not exact dividing line and so now all are called filberts.

Buchanan and Bixby are the only varieties of Mildred filberts thus far fully released by anyone and although neither variety is entirely hardy in the northernmost parts of the country, they do well as far south as eastern Tennessee. The nuts of both are too small to compete in the market with the large filberts of Oregon and Washington, but that is not the purpose for which they have been bred. It is for home planting, a use for which they are admirably adapted. Neither variety should be judged until after they have cured fully, at least a month or more. Then the flavor is excellent.

Of the various introductions made by Mr. Jones, the ones most likely to endure are the Ohio black walnut, the Glover shagbark hickory, and the Mildred filberts. The first has already lasted 32 years; the second 30 years; and the Mildred filberts are only nicely started.[24]

[Footnote 24: Except for the last two paragraphs, this paper was read and approved by Miss Mildred Jones in Pavilion, N. Y., on September 2, 1948. The following day, or September 3, she became Mrs. Wesley Langdoc, of P. O. Box 126, Erie, Illinois.]

+Mr. Reed Comments on Seedling Trees+

+Editor's Note:+ The next two paragraphs should be read in connection with the "Round Table" on chestnut problems, elsewhere in this volume.

In a broad sense, it must be remembered that every variety of seedling tree, of any species and every hybrid form that has ever been planted, or grafted on another tree, has been worth something. This is still a free country and every man has the inalienable right to plant whatever he pleases. Even the hybrids of various forms, hickory, walnut, and chestnut, are all worth something. All are trees and it is better to plant a poor kind of tree than not to plant anything, particularly if it is a nut tree. Whatever prompts a man to plant a tree is worth while.

Hybrid chestnuts bred by crossing Chinese chestnuts of unknown performance record as to habit of bearing, size or flavor of nut, shape of tree, resistance to blight, or spring freezes, and other characteristics which combine to make good nuts, with the inferior and largely inedible Japanese chestnuts, are unlikely to do the damage to the industry that is sometimes predicted. They are now so mixed up that few will be planted by themselves, and there is considerable evidence that the xenia influence of good Chinese chestnuts with which the trees are being planted will render nuts from these hybrid trees fit to market and eat.

[Illustration: MILDRED AND WESLEY LANGDOC]

President Davidson: The value of nut trees in Tennessee, then, will be discussed by Mr. F. S. Chance of the Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station in Knoxville.

The Value of Nut Trees in Tennessee

F. S. CHANCE, Vice-Director, Tennessee Agricultural Experiment Station, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Mr. Chance: Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen: As a representative of the Agricultural Experiment Station of the University of Tennessee I want to say it is a great honor to have this distinguished group meet here in Tennessee, especially on the banks of beautiful Norris Lake, which is one of the tributaries to the dammedest river in the country. We are something like 600 miles from the Gilbertsville Dam, or Kentucky Dam near Paducah, Kentucky, and this area here is the beginning of a chain of lakes that run just about that far.

For those of you who are from a distance, you may know that in making a chain of lakes out of this great Tennessee Valley that we covered up lots of good land. We have developed lots of good power. Now, I am not just sure why I was put on this program, because, really I am not a nut tree specialist, as I see most of you people are. I will admit that I have been associating with experimentation for the last eight or ten years and have become slightly nutty, but really my big interest is timber. I am still a blockhead. So in discussing and talking with you this morning for a few minutes about the value of nut trees in Tennessee I want you to just keep in the back of your minds that the thing in the timber world that I think is the prettiest when it comes to furniture is black walnut.

So in some plantings that we made several years ago with the help of Spencer Chase at our various substations and at the parent station at Knoxville, when we began to prune those trees I wanted to go to pruning for timber and he wanted to go to pruning for nuts. He won. So as we developed these plantings we are sure that we are going to have some very excellent nut trees.

Tennessee ranging in altitude from something over a mile high down to some 300 or 350 feet at Memphis on the Mississippi gives us a very, very wide range of climate. This wide range of climate gives us the possibility of growing a very wide range of timber trees. A great part of that area is soil from a limestone formation. Nearly all parts of Tennessee are well adapted to the production of the black walnut. The tree as a nut tree has not in the past been looked at with such great interest. However, there are farms in Tennessee that have been purchased with walnut kernels. Over the period of years, why, thrifty families, especially in Eastern Tennessee sections, have gathered up the walnuts in the neighborhood round about, cracked them and sold the kernels and from year to year made certain accumulations of that kind, funds, and saved them with enough in the bank or in the sock to buy a farm. I knew one particular person who bought a nice farm in just that way.

Now, a great many of the people in the same neighborhood did not save their walnuts. These walnuts were gathered from everybody's trees without any objection on the part of anyone. But it was a means of those people getting ahead with their savings from their other farming operations, and this wintertime work that they could put in, why, that kind of thrift is the kind that gets people ahead who want to get ahead and have vision.

I might say a few words about pecans in Tennessee. We have throughout the state quite a few scattered native pecans that are used, especially in all except the more western sections of the state. As a whole they are for home use. Now, in the extreme western section of the state we have a certain amount of seedling pecans, mostly, that produce a considerable income to a limited number of people. In the 1945 census something over 4,000 farms reported some income from pecans--this was mostly in the western section of the state--the value of which was something over $32,000, which at the present time would be a considerable under-valuation.

This tree is found, I might say, throughout the state. I recall a few years ago coming off of the Cumberland Plateau down in Warren County into the cove there around Viola and seeing a beautiful grove of pecans along a stream. I hadn't been through that country before, but I had known a family that lived there, and I stopped at a house to see just what those pecans meant. And there was an old lady on the porch who owned the property, and I asked her some questions about it, and she told me how they got there and knew when they were not there. She had been raised on that place but she said, "I want to show you something." So I went with her around the side yard into the back yard, and she had a couple of pecan trees there that were loaded with pecans until the limbs were hanging over just like pear tree limbs, heavily loaded pear tree limbs. I said, "My, what a crop of pecans you have here. That's really wonderful." Those were the budded pecans, the type that is grown farther south of us. She said, "Just wait a minute, now. I don't know whether I have any pecans or not." I said, "What do you mean?" She said, "If the frost is two weeks later than usual we will have a wonderful pecan crop, if we have a late frost. If we have an early frost we don't have any pecans."

It was quite interesting to me to see that wonderful crop hanging on the tree and yet she wasn't at all assured that anything of value would come from it.

We have on some of our holdings at the University experimental Stations some wonderful Chinese chestnut trees. I can't get overly excited over them, remembering the chestnut as we had it once in Tennessee with the long, slender body, wonderful telephone poles and wonderful timber of other kinds, and to see that a tremendous economic loss has come to this country through disease that was and probably is not controllable. But from the nut standpoint we have at the present time some trees that look as though they are going to be the equal of our own native chestnut that covered Tennessee from the mountain top to the river bank. So we are very much in hope that again Tennessee will have a supply of chestnuts which will be equivalent, probably, to the harvest of chestnuts we once had. However, that's going to be many, many years off.

From the experimental standpoint I have been very much interested in the timber type of tree, hoping that our native chestnut trees, at least one out of the billions, maybe would prove to be resistant. However, watching these growths come up from time to time and attain an age sufficient to produce nuts and then have my hopes blighted by going back the next year and finding that the tree was blighted has become rather discouraging. I hope that some of you people will find just such a tree, one that will bear an excellent nut and at the same time produce excellent timber.

Now I am coming to our big asset in the way of nut trees in Tennessee, as I see it. I was rather interested here in Professor Moore's discussion of the honeylocust, that detestable tree which was such a thorn in my flesh as a child, and having heard someone championing it with such a story as he had, I have heard everything now. Everybody, though, has a champion. Even my mother loved me, regardless.

Black walnut is, as I said in the beginning, native to all sections of the state, and I think that through the collection of the better yielding or better cracking nuts by the Tennessee Valley Authority we are going to find in this crop a very potent asset to the state of Tennessee through the income from sale of nuts. We have in the state about four cracking plants. One of them is located in Morristown. Down in the basin part of the state where walnuts do particularly well, three others are in the city of Nashville. There were something like 10 million pounds of walnuts in the shell delivered in Nashville this last year, yielding about 1,200,000 pounds of kernels. Now, this is no mean return from a crop which was really just gathered up with very, very little attention given to the planting. It is just one of these free crops, so to speak.

If we were to add to that income the great income which we have been receiving through the years from the sale of timber trees, we would run the value of the black walnut into considerable proportions, with income from the sale of black walnuts in the kernel and in timber.