LUTHER BURBANK 



annual plants, the first year of planting, while 

 growing on their own roots, and when not over 

 twelve to eighteen inches in height. 



The value of such habits of early bearing, from 

 the standpoint of the plant developer, will be 

 obvious. Ordinarily one must expect, in dealing 

 with nut-bearing trees, to wait for a long term of 

 years between generations. In the case of the 

 hickory, for example, after one has planted the 

 nut, it cannot be expected that the seedlings will 

 hear flowers and thus give opportunity for a sec- 

 ond hybridizing for at least ten years, and no large 

 crop of nuts may be produced till the tree is forty 

 or fifty years old. So even two or three genera- 

 tions of the hickory compass a large part of a 

 century. 



But with my new hybrid chestnuts, generation 

 may succeed generation at intervals of a single 

 year, just as if we were dealing with an annual 

 plant instead of a tree that may live for a century. 

 And of course to this fact very largely I owe the 

 rapid progress of my experiments in the develop- 

 ment of new varieties of chestnuts. 



Not only do the mixed hybrids show this extra- 

 ordinary precocity, but some of them also develop 

 the propensity to bear perpetually. On the same 

 tree may be found at a given time flowers and ripe 

 nuts. Flowers both staminate and pistillate ap 



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