BURBANK'S WAY WITH TREES 



of feet in the air, it seemed a culminating paradox 

 to find larger chestnuts than the mammoth trees 

 of the East ever produce growing on tiny bushes. 

 White blackberries and thornless briers, stoneless 

 plums and seedless grapes, cactus slabs without 

 spines, perfumed callas, blue poppies, I am not 

 sure that any of these seem quite so paradoxical 

 as the dwarfed chestnut tree with its load of mam- 

 moth nuts. 



It goes without saying that the anomalous 

 chestnuts have an interesting history. Although 

 they are still undergoing training in the plant 

 school at Sebastopol, they are nevertheless among 

 the most ancient of Mr. Burbank's remarkable 

 plant productions. The experiments that led to 

 their production were begun as long ago as the 

 year 1884. In the autumn of that year Mr. Bur- 

 bank received his first shipment of plant products 

 from Japan. Among the varied things thus im- 

 ported from the Orient, few had more interesting 

 possibilities than the packet that was labeled in 

 a memorandum: "Twenty-five monster chest- 

 nuts." 



Some years earlier, while Mr. Burbank was still 

 a young man in the East, he had observed that 

 the American chestnut varies rather strikingly, 

 some trees producing much finer nuts than others ; 

 and had noted this variability as seeming to offer 

 opportunities for selective breeding. Now it oc- 

 curred to him that the Japanese chestnuts gave 

 material for hybridizing experiments through 

 which the natural tendency to variation might 



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