218 THE XUT CULTURIST. 



i. e., best and most promising for the conditions under 

 which the seedlings are to be grown. 



For the multiplication and perpetuation of choice 

 varieties we must resort to artificial modes of propaga- 

 tion, mainly by budding and grafting. These modes, 

 however, while the best at present known, are so diffi- 

 cult and uncertain in cool climates, even in the hands 

 of the most skilful propagators, that grafted walnut 

 trees have never been very plentiful in the nurseries of 

 this or other countries with which we have commercial 

 relations. In the south of France nurserymen appear to 

 have been more successful in the propagation of walnuts 

 by budding and grafting, than elsewhere ; but in the 

 northern provinces, as well as in Great Britain, we hear 

 little of this mode of propagation. So difficult has this 

 mode of propagating the walnut been considered in Eng- 

 land, that Thomas Andrew Knight, president of the 

 London Horticultural Society, early in the present cen- 

 tury discouraged all attempts to propagate this tree by 

 such means ; but later, in a paper read before the Soci- 

 ety April 7, 1818, he admits to having changed his 

 mind, especially in regard to budding the walnut, and 

 says : 



"The buds of trees of almost every species succeed 

 with most certainty when inserted on the shoots of the 

 same year's growth ; but the walnut tree appears to 

 afford an exception ; possibly, in some measure, because 

 its buds contain within themselves, in the spring, all 

 the leaves which the tree bears in the following summer, 

 whence its annual shoots cease to elongate soon after its 

 buds unfold ; all its buds of each season are also, conse- 

 quently, very nearly of the same age, and long before 

 any have acquired the proper degree of maturity for 

 being removed, the annual branches have ceased to grow 

 longer or to produce new foliage. ... To obviate the 

 disadvantage arising from the preceding circumstances, I 



