the stock just at the union. If it is budded low, it blights. The bark
gets loose. All those that are grafted high are doing remarkably well.
President Morris: The next on the list is Doctor Deming's paper on "Nut
Promotions."
Doctor Deming: I will read first a communication from Mr. Henry Hales of
Ridgewood, New Jersey.
HALES' PAPER SHELL HICKORY.
My shagbark (paper shell) hickory tree was on my farm when I bought it
in 1868. It had been noticed by the neighbors as bearing a fine nut and
was watched by them for the nuts, but they did not appreciate the value
of them. The late Andrew S. Fuller had not seen them, but asked me to
bring him a few. When he saw them he was surprised and at once
pronounced them the finest hickories he had ever seen, and named them
"Hales' Paper Shell." The hickory is one of the most valuable of North
American nuts. It is of a variable nature. I have over twenty old trees
on my place, and no two bear nuts of the same shape or size, and
although some neighbors planted some nuts from the old tree and produced
fruit from them they were only ordinary sized, so that it is necessary
to propagate them to retain their value. About 1880 Parsons & Son, of
Flushing, N. Y., grafted some in pots under glass, from which trees
these nuts sent are the product. The fruit is fully as fine as the
original tree. Prof. C. B. Sargent of the Arnold Arboretum has taken
great interest in the nut. I have two trees grafted on wild saplings by
Jackson Dawson near bearing size.
Those are the only trees successfully grafted, out of thousands done in
the North outside, from which I am afraid grafting outside in the North
is a failure on hickory stocks. There may be a better chance on pecan
stock, which I have not thoroughly tested under favorable circumstances.
I have been sending northern pecan nuts and had them planted, and sent
scions for working on them in the South; had some failures from natural
causes. Simpson Bros. of Monticello, Florida, have had fair success
there. My share of two year old trees are on the way here. Of the value
of these nuts too much cannot be said. Mr. Fuller ranked them superior
to the Madeira nut. It has remarkable keeping qualities.
It has taken from eighteen to twenty-five years for my grafted trees to
come into bearing.
I earnestly hope that with the knowledge gained so far, the means of
propagation on a large scale will soon be discovered and successfully
carried on. What a gain it would be to the wealth of our food production
and luxury. The American hickory would then stand highest on the list of
our native nuts.
* * * * *
President Morris: Are there any comments upon this paper of Mr. Hales?
So much is being said about the Hales hickory, it seems to me that
possibly we ought to put on record some thoughts in the matter. Mr.
Hales is entitled to more credit than any other man for bringing forward
the development of the shagbark hickory, and his enthusiasm was based
upon this remarkable nut on his grounds. It is a very large nut, and,
like all large nuts, is much coarser in character than small nuts, and,
like all large nuts, lacks delicacy of flavor that we find in small
nuts. It is thinner shelled than most of the shagbarks that we would see
in many days spent in the woods, but when we have for comparison some
smaller nuts, we find shells very much thinner than the shell of the
Hales. The Hales, like many other large hickories, keeps much better
than the small hickories of finer texture and more delicate quality, and
it may be very good at three years of age, while some of the most
delicious of the smaller, more tender and delicate nuts are spoiling at
the end of six months. I don't know that Mr. Hales would take exception
to my way of stating this, but it seems to me that he ought to feel that
we give him all honor, that we think it a remarkable nut, that it is a
nut, because of its size and features, worthy of the enthusiasm he gave
it. There is apt to be some misunderstanding as to the exact position
this holds in relation to other shagbark hickories.
Mr. Littlepage: What is its bearing record as to quantity?
President Morris: The tree has been cut so much for scions that it has
never had a fair chance. It is a prolific tree. It is well worthy of
propagation.
Mr. Littlepage: It is, perhaps,--judging from looking at it--a very fine
shagbark for commercial purposes. Isn't it true that within the next ten
years there will, in all probability, be a complete reversion in the
mind of the nut culturist as to the kind and quality of the nut he will
propagate. I will supplement that by saying that heretofore, both in the
pecan and other nut fields, the whole tendency has been toward something
big. Now, the wise fellows in the South today are beginning to get away
from that. I have made many trips down there, and I find there is a very
changing sentiment. I want to say that in my observation the future
price of the various nuts of the country is going to be determined by
the price of nut meat; that the meats are going to be put on the market,
and while there will always be plenty of nuts marketed in the shell, the
price of the nut meat will be the dominant factor. I was walking down G
Street in Washington the other day with an ex-United States Senator, and
ex-member of Congress, and an ex-Governor, and they passed a nut store,
and saw in the window some nuts, also a big box of nut meats. Everyone
went in, and all passed up the nuts and bought the nut meat. That
expresses, to my notion, the tendency that is coming; and that thing is
going, then, to determine very largely the question of quality.
President Morris: I think we certainly are going to have a complete
change in ideas about raising nuts. We are going to raise big ones of
the kinds where everybody will buy one pound and nobody will buy two
pounds. We are going to raise nuts that will appeal to the people who
purchase things in the open market, and who never in their lives get
hold of anything that is good. We are going also to raise nuts that will
appeal to connoisseurs, and that will be bought by people who know one
work of art from another. In other words, we are going to make the
progress in nut culture that has been made in other fields of
horticulture. At the present time, if one could raise a pear as big as a
watermelon and tasting like the rind, that would be the pear that would
sell in the market. But the connoisseur buys the Seckel in place of it.
When there is a pear like the Kieffer that will fill the top of the tree
so there is no room for leaves and branches, the market men are going to
raise that pear. But when we go into the market, we go around a block to
escape the place where they sell the Kieffer pear, and we buy the
Bartlett. We have precisely the same problems in nut culture.
Mr. Pomeroy: I have been thinking some on this line. I have spent a good
many half hours in the last four or five years with an old German in
Buffalo. He has a stand on one of the big markets. I find that he has a
whole lot to say in regard to what the people buy. He has found this
out, and he has been there a good many years. He says, "I have been
getting black walnuts from the same farmer boy for six or seven years.
They are fine; try one." He has learned something about the different
trees throughout that section, and about some nuts that are being
shipped in, and he can tell the varieties. He has customers that do come
back after the second package of nuts. He is trying to keep those
customers one year after another. He is creating the demand. When I was
a youngster, if I could have received the prices for black walnuts and
butternuts that youngsters get now, I would have thought I was a
capitalist. Butternuts are retailing at two dollars and two dollars and
a half, and black walnuts the same.
President Morris: We have got to get away from the idea that we are
going to find the best hickory nut or the best walnut or the best nut of
any kind in the largest nut. Nature spreads out just so much material in
the way of flavor and good quality of a nut, and if it is in a large
nut, those good qualities are spread out thin; if it is in a small nut,
they are concentrated.
Professor Lake: I wish I were as optimistic as Mr. Littlepage in this
matter. That is because he has been studying all nuts for twenty-five or
thirty years, and I have only been dabbling around in Persian walnuts
for about twenty years. I have been dabbling with apples twenty-five or
more years, and the real connoisseurs of the apple have been telling us
during that time that the Ben Davis would be wiped out inside of ten
years. I heard that twenty years ago. I believe that there are more Ben
Davis apples being consumed by the public today than any other one
apple. Notwithstanding that, every man who knows good apples goes out
and decries it. It is because that apple can be grown anywhere by
anybody at any time, and will be eaten by the people. The kind of nut
that is going to make the money the next twenty-five or thirty years is
the nut that is prolific, of fair quality, that can be grown by any man,
and that has a fairly good appearance. I believe that the process of
educating the public on the matter of quality is going to be
tremendously slow. It is not always the case, however, that the smaller
the size, the better the quality. A medium size would be better. The
Yellow Newtown is quite a large apple, and it is superior in quality to
the Winesap.
President Morris: I was stating a general rule.
Professor Lake: I fear we aren't going to be able to educate the people.
How many people who eat nuts know anything about their quality? Dr.
Morris has got the ideal of the best nut in walnuts, for instance, the
French Mayette. That is the connoisseur's choice. I know of many people
who will tell you very frankly they prefer the American grown
Franquette, which is much more starchy in make-up and much less nutty.
Mr. Littlepage: I think there is a great deal in what Professor Lake
says. I am not sure he has got the cause of the facts he states. One
reason why the Ben Davis is being planted is, as he stated, that it will
grow almost anywhere; but the reason the public accept the Ben Davis is
because they can't get enough of another at a reasonable price. There
isn't any doubt that if there were plenty others at a reasonable price
the Ben Davis wouldn't be used at all. We hear so much today about this
high cost of living. Of course, there are artificial conditions that
have contributed to this to a greater or less extent; but the principal
element is that we have come up against the problem of feeding the great
American public, that has grown faster than the facilities have grown.
The time for low priced food products is gone forever. Yet there is a
good deal in this commercial phase of it.
President Morris: The Hales hickory is going to be like the Ben Davis
apple, one of the very most popular in the market.
Doctor Deming: I will say regarding the retail price of nuts that in New
York City shelled filberts are priced at $1.25 a pound, shelled almonds
$1.00, ordinary run of hickories and chestnuts in the shells twenty
cents, black walnuts in the shell twelve cents.
President Morris: Hickories will give somewhat over fifty pounds to the
bushel; black walnuts about forty. If we make a rough estimate of fifty
pounds to the bushel for shagbarks, and forty for Persian walnuts, we
will probably have a good fair average.
NUT PROMOTIONS.
BY W. C. DEMING, NEW YORK.
Promoters attack their quarry with a two-edged sword; one edge is what
they say, the other what they leave unsaid; and both edges are often
keen. What they say generally has a foundation of truth with a
superstructure of gilded staff. You must knock over the staff and
examine the foundations to see if they are laid up in good cement mortar
or only mud. Sometimes they are honestly laid but your true promoter can
no more help putting on his Coney Island palace of dreams than a yellow
journal reporter can help making a good story of the most everyday
assignment. I suppose he takes a professional pride in his decorations,
even when the real facts themselves are good enough. Or even, in his
enthusiasm, half believes, and fully hopes, that what he says is true.
So you never can say that because of the evident gilding there is
nothing worth while beneath.
What the promoter does not say it is absolutely necessary for the safe
investor to find out. Deductions from experience in general, and from
knowledge of the business in particular, will help and, when these favor
further investigation, there are two essentials for a wise decision.
First, a study of the records of the promoters, and second, a personal
examination of the property. If these can be thoroughly made, and the
results are satisfactory after a suitable period of mental incubation,
if the prospects will stand the candle test for fertility, you may put
some money on the chance of a good hatch; remembering, too, that many a
good hatch afterward comes to grief with the pip.
Some promotions are conceived in iniquity, some in drunkenness and folly
and some are abortive from incapacity. Your legitimate and well-born,
well-brought-up promotion, fathered by ability and mothered by honesty,
it is your problem to recognize, if that is what you are looking for,
and to avoid the low-born trickster or incapable. No one can tell you
how to do this any more than he can tell you an easy way to graft
hickories.
The northern nut grower is not yet bothered with northern nut
promotions. At most he is called on to discount the statements of
sellers of trees, and that a little, not too expensive, experience will
teach him. The West is apparently too busy selling fruit and fruit lands
to lay out nuts to trap eastern nibblers. But the allurements of pecan
growing in the South are spread before us with our bread and butter and
morning coffee. The orange and pomelo properties have been banished from
the stage, or made to play second fiddle, and now we see in the
limelight the pecan plantation, with a vista of provision for old age
and insurance for our children. And there shall be no work nor care nor
trouble about it at all. Only something down and about ten dollars a
month for ninety-six months. And the intercropping is to more than pay
for that. It is indeed an enticing presentation.
Although we have as yet no northern nut promotions we may expect the
time when the sandy barrens of the shore and the boulder pastures of the
rock ribbed hills will be cut up into five acre plots and promoted as
the natural home of the chestnut and the hickory, holding potential
fortunes for their developers. I hope it will be so for it will
postulate a foundation in fact. But the chestnut blight and the
unresponsiveness of the hickory to propagation as yet hold up these
future camp followers of the northern nut growing pioneers. So that for
the present there is only the sword of the southern pecan promoter to
parry.
It would be a work of supererogation and effrontery for me to attempt to
treat this subject in particular since it has been so clearly and ably
done by Col. C. A. Van Duzee of St. Paul, Minn., and Viking, Fla., from
the standpoint of long experience and full knowledge. His paper should
be read by all interested persons. I am permitted to make the following
quotations from it:
"The pecan as an orchard tree has recently been discovered and its
history has not been written. The record at present is largely based on
scattered individual trees growing under abnormal conditions which, as a
rule, are favorable....
"Calculations and deductions based upon these results have been made
which are fascinating, but they are utterly unreliable when applied to
orchards of other trees in different localities growing under totally
different conditions?...
"No one knows what a pecan orchard grown under such conditions is going
to do."
Col. Van Duzee, however, expresses firm belief in the success of pecan
growing under proper personal supervision.
It all comes down to the question, "Can you or I hire our business done
for us, never go near it ourselves and expect others to make a success
of it for us?"
And yet, when all is said, I confess that I have been tempted by my
faith in the present and future of pecan growing in the South. I might
have invested were it not for my firm belief that, in nut growing, the
North is but a few years behind the South, and that I wish to devote my
resources and my energies to having a hand in a development which, I
share with you the belief, is to be of inestimable benefit to the human
race. We can picture the day when our dooryards, our roadsides, our
fields and hills shall be shaded by grand nut trees, showering
sustenance and wealth on our descendants, and all people, and bearing
the names of their originators; when the housewife of the future shall
send her wireless call to the grocer for a kilo of Hales' Papershells,
the Rush, the Jones, the Pomeroy Persian walnuts, the Black Ben Deming
butternut, the Craig Corean chestnut, the Morris Hybrid hickory, the
Close black-walnut or the Littlepage pecan.
* * * * *
President Morris: It is a very timely paper. The number of promoters we
find in connection with any subject furnishes an index of the
fundamental value of the original proposition. The number of dishonest
people, the number of fakirs that are now promoting development schemes
in connection with the pecan indicates that down at the bottom
somewhere, there is a real gold mine. We will go on to Mr. Roper's
paper.
SOME FACTS CONCERNING PECAN TREES FOR PLANTING IN THE NORTH.
W. N. ROPER, PETERSBURG, VA.
Pecan trees for successful culture in the North must be of hardy,
early-maturing varieties, budded on stocks from northern pecans and
grown in nursery under suitable climatic conditions. These are
requisites indicated by practical, experimental work and observations
extending over several years.
The successful production of large southern pecans in far northern
climates can hardly be looked for except under the most favorable
conditions of soil, location and season. There seems no good reason for
planting southern pecans in the far North, except in an experimental
way; for there are northern varieties now being propagated that are the
equal of most of the standard southern sorts in quality and very little
below them in size. They will prove to be as large or larger in the
North than the southern varieties grown in the same locality, and much
more apt to bear regularly.
The method used in propagating the hardy types is important. Budding and
root-grafting each has its advocates among pecan growers in the South,
and this would indicate that there is no great difference between the
trees propagated by these two methods when they are planted in that
section. But based on results with several hundred specimens,
root-grafted pecan trees are not desirable for planting in northern
climates.
During the past six years there have been grown in nursery, in the
eastern part of Virginia, near Petersburg, about 2,000 root-grafted
trees of eight southern varieties of pecans and one Virginia variety,
including Stuart, Van Deman, Moneymaker, and Mantura. All these trees
are worthless. None of them, though they have been cared for, has ever
been considered by the grower fit to dig and transplant. Most of these
trees suffer winter injury each year, many of them being killed back to
the graft union. Those that do not die below the ground grow out the
following summer, only to be killed back again the next winter or
spring. Those damaged only a part of the way down the trunks, even when
not badly injured, do not recover promptly. Several hundred budded trees
grown during the same period in adjoining rows have been entirely free
from any winter injury. The grafts and buds were inserted on stocks from
northern and southern nuts.
A thousand budded and root-grafted trees received from six southern
nurserymen were planted in orchards in the same locality. A very large
percentage of the root-grafted trees died; only a small percentage of
the budded trees died. Many of the root-grafted trees that survived are
making poor growth; most of the budded trees are strong and vigorous.
The only trees of the Virginia varieties ever reported winter-killed
were root-grafts.
No root-grafts of the northern types on northern stocks have been made
in Virginia, but root-grafts of Indiana varieties on southern stocks
transplanted there winter-kill badly. Several Indiana trees root-grafted
on southern stocks and in their second year's growth in the nursery
winter-killed in Florida last season. Not a single budded Indiana tree
in Virginia suffered any winter injury whatever, although the buds were
grown on southern as well as on northern stocks. All the root-grafted
Indiana trees transplanted at Petersburg during the past two years have
died from winter injury.
Northern types root-grafted on northern stocks not having been tested,
no definite information can be given, of course; but with all southern
varieties winter-killing in the North, when root-grafted on either
northern or southern stocks, and the Virginia variety winter-killing
when root-grafted on southern or northern stocks, and the Indiana
varieties winter-killing both in the North and in the South when
root-grafted on southern stocks, it seems reasonable to presume that the
northern varieties root-grafted on northern stocks will also
winter-kill. The stocks of the root-grafted trees are seldom injured.
They send up sprouts except in cases where the graft union is so far
beneath the surface of the soil that after the grafted part is killed
the stock is too deep to grow out.
Not a single tree out of a total of 40,000 seedlings in Virginia grown
from northern nuts planted during a period of six years has ever been
found affected by winter injury; practically all the trees out of 50,000
or more grown in the same locality from southern nuts, planted during
the same years had their tops affected by winter injury the first, and
most of them the second season of their growth; but no injury after the
second season has been noted.
With the view of making southern varieties better adapted to planting in
northern area, experiments have been made in propagating them on stocks
from northern nuts. This stock has thus far proved unsatisfactory for
southern varieties either budded or root grafted. The trees from
northern nuts go dormant earlier in the fall and remain dormant later in
the spring than trees from southern nuts. Northern trees in the nursery
rows in early spring, in a perfectly dormant condition, are in striking
contrast with the southern trees and their fresh, green foliage. Though
the growing period in the North is nearly a fourth shorter for the
northern than for the southern varieties, the native trees in the North
make equal growth with the southern trees there during the same season.
Northern varieties budded on northern stocks grown at Petersburg the
past summer made nearly as much growth during one season as root-grafted
trees of the same varieties on southern stocks grown in Florida two
seasons. The trees at Petersburg were from dormant buds set the previous
fall. They were just starting into growth in May when the trees in
Florida had made a growth of six to twelve inches.
The northern seedlings in the North make better growth in a season than
the northern seedlings in the South, as far as has been observed. When
the growing period begins in the northern climate, the native trees
respond at once to the quick growing season and outgrow the trees that
have been accustomed to a slower growing climate. When their growing
period is over, they begin promptly their preparation for the winter.
The long, slow growing climate of the South does not seem to give the
quick growing tree of the North an opportunity for its greatest growth
at the important period. There appears to be too much difference between
the growing habits of the southern and the northern pecans for either to
be suitable stock upon which to grow the other.