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 
bear 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 
[104] 
