PECANS AND THEIR HYBRIDS
At the same time, October 1924, that I purchased Beaver hickory trees
from J. F. Jones, I also procured from him three specimens each of three
commercial varieties of pecan trees, the Posey, Indiana and Niblack, as
well as some hiccan trees, i.e., hybrids having pecan and hickory
parents. Only one tree survived, a Niblack pecan, which, after sixteen
years, was only about eighteen inches in height. Its annual growth was
very slight and it was killed back during the winter almost the full
amount of the year's growth. In the 17th year this tree was dead.
In September 1925, at a convention of the Northern Nut Growers'
Association in St. Louis, Missouri, I became acquainted with a man whose
experience in the nut-growing industry was wide and who knew a great
deal about the types of hickory and pecan trees in Iowa. He was S. W.
Snyder of Center Point, Iowa. (He later became president of the
Association.) In one of his letters to me the following summer, Mr.
Snyder mentioned that there were wild pecan trees growing near Des
Moines and Burlington. I decided I wanted to know more about them and at
my request, he collected ten pounds of the nuts for me. I found they
were the long type of pecan, small, but surprisingly thin-shelled and
having a kernel of very high quality.
I first planted these nuts in an open garden in St. Paul, but after a
year I moved them to my farm, where I set them out in nursery rows in an
open field. The soil there was a poor grade of clay, not really suited
to nut trees, but even so, most of the ones still remaining there have
made reasonably good growth. I used a commercial fertilizing compound
around about half of these seedlings which greatly increased their rate
of growth, although they became less hardy than the unfertilized ones.
After five years, I transplanted a number of them to better soil, in
orchard formation. Although I have only about fifty of the original
three hundred seedlings, having lost the others mainly during droughts,
these remaining ones have done very well. Some of these trees have been
bearing small crops of nuts during the years 1947 to date. The most
mature nuts of these were planted and to date I have 17 second
generation pure pecan trees to testify as to the ability of the northern
pecan to become acclimated.
I gave several of the original seedlings to friends who planted them in
their gardens, where rich soil has stimulated them to grow at twice the
rate of those on my farm. There were four individual pecan trees growing
in or near St. Paul from my first planting, the largest being about 25
feet high with a caliber of five inches a foot above ground. Although
this tree did not bear nuts I have used it as a source of scionwood for
several years. These graftings, made on bitternut hickory stock, have
been so successful that I am continuing their propagation at my nursery,
having named this variety the Hope pecan, for Joseph N. Hope, the man
who owns the parent tree and who takes such an interest in it.
[Illustration: _Shows the use of a zinc metal tag fastened by 16 or 18
gauge copper wire to branch of tree._]
By the year 1950 the tree had such a straggly appearance, although still
healthy and growing but being too shaded by large trees on the
boulevard, that Mr. Hope caused it to be cut down. The variety is still
growing at my farm, grafted on bitternut stocks and although blossoming
it has never produced a nut up to this time.
Another tree given to Joseph Posch of the city of St. Paul, Minnesota,
had made even better growth and was luxuriantly healthy and in bloom
when it was cut down by the owner because the branches overhung the
fence line into a neighbor's yard. This was done in about 1950.
Another tree given to Mrs. Wm. Eldridge of St. Paul still flourishes and
is quite large (in 1952 at breast height, 6 inches in diameter) but
being in a dense shade, it has not borne any nuts.
The fourth tree, given to John E. Straus, the famous skate maker,
presumably exists at his lake residence north of St. Paul. I have not
seen it in the last seven or eight years.
Although they are not as hardy as bitternut stocks, I have found the
wild Iowa pecan seedlings satisfactory for grafting after five years'
growth. I use them as an understock for grafting the Posey, Indiana and
Major varieties of northern pecan and find them preferable to northern
bitternut stocks with which the pecans are not compatible for long, as a
rule, such a union resulting in a stunted tree which is easily
winter-killed. Although the Posey continued to live for several years
our severe winters finally put an end to all these fine pecans. The root
system of the seedling understock continued to live, however.
I chanced to discover an interesting thing in the fall of 1941 which
suggests something new in pecan propagation. There were two small pecans
growing in the same rows as the large ones planted fifteen years
previously. When I noticed them, I thought they were some of this same
planting and that they had been injured or frozen back to such an extent
that they were mere sprouts again, for this has happened. I decided to
move them and asked one of the men on the farm to dig them up. When he
had dug the first, I was surprised to find that this was a sprout from
the main tap root of a large pecan tree which had been taken out and
transplanted. The same was true of the second one, except that in this
case we found three tap roots, the two outside ones both having shoots
which were showing above the ground. Another remarkable circumstance
about this was that these tap roots had been cut off twenty inches below
the surface of the ground and the sprouts had to come all that distance
to start new trees. All of this suggests the possibility of pecan
propagation by root cuttings. These two pecans, at least, show a natural
tendency to do this and I have marked them for further experimentation
along such lines.
On the advice of the late Harry Weber of Cincinnati, Ohio, an eminent
nut culturist, who, after visiting my nursery in 1938, became very
anxious to try out some of the Indiana varieties of pecans in our
northern climate, I wrote to J. Ford Wilkinson, a noted propagator of
nut trees at Rockport, Indiana, suggesting that he make some
experimental graftings at my farm. Both Mr. Wilkinson and Mr. Weber
gathered scionwood from all the black walnut, pecan, hiccan and hickory
trees at their disposal, for this trial. There was enough of it to keep
three of us busy for a week grafting it on large trees. Our equipment
was carried on a two-wheeled trailer attached to a Diesel-powered
tractor, and we were saved the trouble of having to carry personally,
scions, packing material, wax pots, knives, pruning shears, tying
material, canvas and ladders into the woods. Mr. Wilkinson remarked, on
starting out, that in the interests of experimental grafting, he had
travelled on foot, on horseback, by mule team and in rowboats, but that
this was his first experience with a tractor.
When he saw the type of grafting with which I had been getting good
results, Mr. Wilkinson was astounded. He declared that using a side-slot
graft in the South resulted in 100% failure, while I had more than 50%
success with it. He was willing to discard his type of grafting for
mine, which was adequate for the work we were doing, but I wanted to
check his grafting performance and urged him to continue with his own
(an adaptation of the bark-slot graft to the end of a cut-off stub). We
both used paper sacks to shade our grafts. Although results proved that
my methods averaged a slightly higher percentage of successful graftings
in this latitude and for the type of work we were doing, his would
nonetheless be superior in working over trees larger than four inches in
diameter and having no lateral branches up to eight feet above ground,
at which height it is most convenient to cut off a large hickory
preparatory to working on it.
In the late fall of that year, we cut scionwood of the season's growth
and inverted large burlap bags stuffed with leaves over the grafts, the
bags braced on the inside by laths to prevent their collapsing on the
grafts. So we have perpetuated the following varieties:
Hickories: Cedar Rapids, Taylor, Barnes, Fairbanks.
Hiccans: McAlester, Bixby, Des Moines, Rockville, Burlington, Green
Bay.
The Major and Posey pure pecans being incompatible on bitternut hickory
roots were grafted on pecan stocks, but they proved to be tender to our
winters and the varieties were finally lost.
[Illustration: _Largest planted pecan in World having a record. About 17
ft. circumference breast height, 125 ft. spread and 125 ft. height. Very
small worthless pecans. Easton, Maryland. Photo by Reed 1927_]
Other experiments I have made with pecans include an attempt to grow
Southern pecans from seed, but they seem to be no more hardy than an
orange tree would be. It is certain that they are not at all suited to
the climate of the 45th parallel. In 1938, I received from Dr. W. C.
Deming of Connecticut, some very good nuts from a large pecan tree at
Hartford, Connecticut. Of the twelve pecans I planted, only six
sprouted, and of these, only one has survived up to this date and is now
a small weak tree. Apparently, the seedlings of this Hartford pecan are
not as hardy as those from Iowa.
[Illustration: _Iowa seedling Pecans. Tree planted in 1926 as seed.
First crop October 29, 1953. 7/8 of actual size. Nuts were fully
matured. Photo by C. Weschcke_]
Of the hiccans, hybrids between hickory and pecan, there are several
varieties, as I mentioned before. Of these, the McAlester is the most
outstanding, its nuts measuring over three inches in circumference and
about three inches long. Horticulturists believe that this hybrid is the
result of a cross between a shell-bark hickory, which produces the
largest nut of any hickory growing in the United States, and a large
pecan. I have experimented a number of times with the McAlester and my
conclusion is that it is not hardy enough to advocate its being grown in
this climate. There are other hiccans hardier than it is, however, such
as the Rockville, Burlington, Green Bay and Des Moines, and it is
certain that the North is assured of hardy pecans and a few hardy
hybrids, which, although they do not bear the choicest pecan nuts, make
interesting and beautiful lawn trees. Indeed, as an ornamental tree, the
pecan is superior to the native hickory in two definite ways: by its
exceedingly long life, which may often reach over 150 years as
contrasted with the average hickory span of 100 years, and by its
greater size. One pecan tree I saw growing in Easton, Maryland, in
1927, for example, was then seventeen feet in circumference at
breast-height, one hundred twenty-five feet in height and having a
spread of one hundred fifty feet. The wood of the pecan is similar to
that of the hickory in both toughness and specific gravity, although for
practical purposes, such as being used for tool handles, the shagbark
hickory is enough harder and tougher to make it the superior of the two.
I was pleasantly surprised on October 30, 1953 when a pecan seedling of
the Iowa origin, which had not yet borne any nuts, showed a small crop.
These nuts were fully matured and were of sufficient size so that they
could be considered a valuable new variety of pecan nut for the North. A
plate showing a few of these pecans illustrates, by means of a ruler,
the actual size of these pecans, and the fact that they matured so well
by October 30 indicates that in many seasons they may be relied upon to
mature their crop. No other data has been acquired on this variety and
we can only be thankful that we can expect it to do a little better in
size as successive crops appear, which is the usual way of nut trees.
Also, by fertilizing this tree we can expect bigger nuts, as is
generally the case. The shell of this pecan is so thin that it can be
easily cracked with the teeth, which I have done repeatedly, and
although small is thinner-shelled than any standard pecan.