LUTHER BURBANK 



The largest tree that I have ever seen in New 

 England was an elm that grew in Lancaster, my 

 boyhood home, and which I have reason to believe 

 was a hybrid. 



As I was born and brought up under the elm 

 I have naturally an affection for them greater 

 perhaps that for any other tree. On a visit to my 

 old home I secured branches of the gigantic hybrid 

 and brought them to California, and grafted them 

 on roots of a seedling of the American elm on my 

 place at Santa Rosa. 



When this grafted tree was only fifteen years 

 old, it was two and a half feet in diameter. Its 

 hybrid character was obvious to all botanists who 

 examined it. 



Doubtless this accounts for its extraordinary 

 rapidity of growth. This was of course a natural 

 hybrid, but it stands to-day as an object lesson in 

 the possibility of hybridizing various species of 

 elms and thus producing a tree of extraordinary 

 rapid growth. 



I have not experimented further with the elm 

 in this direction; but the hybrid tree that thus 

 reproduced the personality of a giant elm in the 

 shadows of which I passed my boyhood a 

 souvenir that links the home of my mature years 

 with the home of my ancestors is a source of 

 perpetual pleasure. 



[END OF VOLUME XI] 



