TOP-WOEKING SEEDLING PECAN TREES. 5 



Every kind of budding is magical. Is it not wonderful to make a 

 crab-apple tree produce Stayman or Grimes Golden apples or a quince 

 bush produce luscious Duchess pears? Is it not strange that the sap 

 from the same root can produce red apples on one branch, yellow ones 

 on another, and russets on a third? How does it come that one twig 

 can be made to produce sour apples and the next Paradise Sweets? 

 Strange ! Wonderful ! ! but True ! ! ! It is all owing to the fact that the 

 sap of a tree is a homogeneous substance and that it is the bud through 

 which it passes that stamps the individuality upon it, whether it shall 

 be a crab or a Grimes Golden. If we make all the buds of the tree of 

 the Grimes character, the apples will all be Grimes Golden. In the same 

 way, if we make all the buds on a pecan tree Stuarts or Schleys, there 

 will be nuts to be gathered from that tree, and they will not be worth- 

 less scrub seedlings. 



When I began my experiments in the top-working of seedling pecan 

 trees I soon found that there were many things one could not do with 

 pecan trees. I counted myself a successful propagator of apples, peaches, 

 plums, grapes, and various other kinds of plants ; but apple, peach, and 

 general propagation methods failed to give success in the budding and 

 grafting of pecans. I concluded the method must be all right, but that 

 I should be more exact about my mechanical manipulations. I started 

 out with the ordinary cleft graft commonly used for top-working most 

 sorts of trees. I experimented in several different orchards and put in 

 hundreds of cleft grafts. I took great pains to make my work as me- 

 chanically perfect as possible. All conditions of stock, cions, weather, 

 etc., seemed to promise the highest degree of success. The result of that 

 season's work was a world of disappointment, a lot of experience, and 

 two living grafts. One of these latter, the result of my skill, was so 

 effectively pruned that fall by the pecan girdler that my work for the 

 season w r as practically a minus quantity in all but experience. The 

 other living graft, which was put in by an assistant, is now a bearing 

 Curtis tree, our only monument to the success of cleft grafting the pecan. 

 Other propagators are said to be able to secure fair results with cleft 

 grafting of pecans in certain localities; but from my experience, I am 

 willing to aver that it cannot be done in this latitude. 



Next followed a series of trials with shield budding, which is so uni- 

 formly successful with peach; but peach methods failed entirely with 

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