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] 
