The Bulletin. 29 



seedling, but it was a seedling with such high individual merit that 

 it was desirable to have thousands and thousands like it. Fortunately 

 we have in horticulture the practices of budding and grafting which 

 reproduce unerringly every characteristic of the parent plant. No ! 

 not parent plant, but the same plant, for budding and grafting are 

 merely horticultural long division, for they make new individuals, 

 ad infinitum, by simply dividing the original one. The trees, there- 

 fore, of named varieties are identical with the trees from which the 

 buds were taken, and never can be anything else. An orchard planted 

 with budded or grafted Stuart trees will all have the same habit of 

 growth, texture of foliage, shape, size and color of nut, with the same 

 full, meaty, fine-flavored kernel. In commercial orcharding this 

 insures a uniformity of ripening, a uniformity of product and a 

 certainty of results. In planting nuts or seedling trees there will 

 be as many varieties as there are trees, for no two individuals are 

 exactly alike. The planter who has 100 seedling pecan trees will 

 have exactly 100 different varieties. , The nuts will be of every dif- 

 ferent size, shape, color and quality. A uniform grade of nuts from 

 a seedling orchard is therefore impossible. 



There is as much difference between ordinary seedling pecans 

 and the named varieties as between the luscious Crawford peach and a 

 roadside seedling. Fig. 14 shows a life-size photograph of a very 

 fair seedling pecan and a nut of the Stuart variety. Seedling nuts 

 are generally undersize. It would take about 200 nuts of this seed- 

 ling to make a pound, the largest part of which would be shell. In 

 a pound of Stuarts there would be- only about 40 nuts, and the 

 largest proportion of this weight would be fine, edible meat. A com- 

 mon fault with seedling nuts, particularly those that would seem to 

 commend themselves by fairly large size, is that they do not fill 

 up their shells. This fault is shared even by some named varieties 

 that have been chosen especially for size. Fig. 15 shows different 

 views of a desirable type of nut, of which the thin shell is packed 

 tight with meat. The larger nut, compared with it, has a much 

 thicker shell, which is far from being filled. The nonfilling of the 

 shell does not seem to be due to lack of food or tillage, but is an in- 

 herent characteristic of the tree, just as its habit of growth or its shape 

 of foliage. I have given to poor fillers the most intensive tillage and 

 as high as 75 pounds of high-grade fertilizer per tree, and could not 

 see that the kernels were any more plump than before. Some varieties 

 are naturally good fillers, no matter on what kind of soil they grow. 

 The varieties Curtis and Schley always pack their shells so full of 

 meat that the kernels cracked out look bigger than the whole nuts. 

 They are always this way, no matter the kind of soil. These varieties 

 have also very thin shells. The sutures of the kernels are shallow 

 and do not retain the bitter lining of the shells, but crack out freely, 

 leaving the meat in unbroken halves. 



