96 



The Garden Magazine, October, 1921 



Chestnuts need no praise; but the fatal disease has effectually 

 stopped any considerable planting of the native. Yet the 

 Japanese varieties are available for the garden. They fruit 

 when still quite young and have larger nuts if not quite so sweet 

 as the chinkapin. 



FILBERTS offer a striking contrast: The plant is more of 

 a bush than a tree, though it can be trained into a low, 

 bushy tree. In its bushy form the Filbert can be used with 

 profit to form hedges, screens, and massed plantings. It can 

 be kept unnaturally low by pruning; and pruning encourages 

 the formation of fruit spurs. Its leaves are very beautiful, 

 and the leafy involucres that contain the nuts are highly ar- 

 tistic. 



When planting Filberts, use good European varieties. These 

 nuts have been bred up to large size and good quality. They 

 should never be planted with or near the native Filberts or 



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Hazel Nuts which are troubled by a disease that does not ex- 

 tensively harm them but which is absolutely ruinous to the 

 European varieties. A good Filbert should bear 20 pounds 

 of nuts a year at maturity. A hedge or a mass planting, there- 

 fore, would be profitable as well as beautiful, even if the yield 

 were but half as great as the estimate. 



A little Filbert costs about as much as a fine Walnut, and 

 enough of them to form a hedge would cost a good deal, but 

 any one can multiply Filberts readily by layering. A pliant 

 shoot is bent over horizontally and pinned under the ground 

 with a peg at a node. The top is bent upward and tied to a 

 vertical stake. The part underground will strike root and 

 the shoot may then be cut from the parent. In our own gar- 

 dens we have made a start toward a Filbert hedge, with two 

 bushes, from which we are propagating in this way. These 

 are of different varieties, as is desirable, for the Filbert needs 

 cross pollination. In fact, cross pollination is being increasingly 



recognized as an important factor 

 in the successful cultivation of 

 many fruits and other things be- 

 sides nuts. 





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THE Hard-shelled Almond is 

 another nut tree that can be 

 trown successfully in the North. 

 To be sure, the nuts are inferior 

 go the paper-shelled almonds of 

 commerce, but the trees are small 

 and ornamental, and by pruning 



A GLEESOME SPORT OF CHILD- 

 HOOD RAPIDLY BECOMING A 

 MERE MEMORY 



Blight has been doing its baleful work so 

 effectively that the Chestnut with all its 

 happy associations will soon be a thing 

 of the past — those October mornings 

 when sticks were whirled upwards and 

 ripe burrs came tumbling down, when 

 the whole round world seemed atingle 

 with merry shouts and laughter — too bad 

 that autumn must lose its chiefest joy for 

 childhood with the going of the Chestnut ! 



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'And shouting boys in woodland haunts 



caught glimpses of that sky, 

 Flecked by the many-tinted leaves, and 

 laughed, they knew not why;" 



'Once more the liberal year laughs out 

 O'er richer stores than gems or gold; 



Once more with harvest- song and shout 

 Is Nature's bloodless triumph told." 

 lVbittier 



Helen W. Cooke, Photo. 



