34 THE NEW HORTICULTURE. 



soil, like nature chooses, is better than any preparation man cam 

 make. I will further add that about ten years ago I turned out a 

 part of a cultivated field adjoining that woodland pasture, and the 

 squirrels have tried their hands on it also, but with no better luck 

 than my father, for the trees are just as scrubby and inferior to those 

 alongside in the woods, as were his, and we call them "cornfield" 

 walnuts, to designate their inferiority. 



Yours very truly, 



C. B. PATTERSON. 



A few days after receiving this letter, I came across the 

 following, in the New York Sun, which was so strongly cor- 

 roborative that I cut it out : 



The finest shipment of walnut for 1895 came from Texas, but as 

 a rule Indiana walnut is the best. Kentucky has more than any 

 other state, but it does not average as high as in Indiana. The 

 largest walnut mill in the world is in Chicago, and it uses about three 

 thousand car loads a year. Fifty dollars per thousand is about the 

 average price for the best grade of walnut, and this is all natural 

 forest growth, what is known as "cornfield" walnut being hard, irregu- 

 lar, and has more or less windshakes. Figured walnut is very 

 costly, and is used for veneering. One man in West Virginia owns a 

 figured tree which cost him one thousand dollars, for which he has 

 refused three thousand, and asks four thousand, there being over six 

 thousand feet of lumber in it. 



With all this indisputable evidence of the vast superiority 

 of the firm, solid seed-bed, on which nature plants her trees, 

 is it possible to resist the conclusion that, while poor, long, 

 fibrous-rooted trees need soft ground and to be "fed with a 

 spoon," the sturdy seedling and close root-pruned tree de- 

 light to overcome the resistance of unbroken ground ? 



