if 
TO 
General Catalogue and Price List. 
NEVADA CITY, CALIFORNIA. 
FELIX GILLET, Proprietor. 
A CHAPTER ON WALNUTS. 
After twenty years of the most strenuous efforts on our part in awakening among 
the people of this and other States, a deep interest in behalf of Walnut culture, so little un- 
derstood and for so long, and wrongly so, under a cloud ; it is gratifying to us to see that 
our efforts have not been in vain, and that the Walnut has at last rome to the front ; 
the most lively interest in favor of its culture having been awakened everywhere, near 
and far, even penetrating the quiet abode of scientific agriculture in the Capital of the Na- 
tion, and where the possibilities of our great country in anything pertaining to Agricult- 
ure and Horticulture are so ably discussed and the results given to the people in those 
ponderous reports that should be in the hands of every Horticulturist in the laud. 
We have for years explained in articles to the press and in our own pamphlets why 
Walnut-culture had been so neglected, and why people considered it as unprofitable ; we 
have shown that the whole trouble arose from the sole planting on this coast of the 
most delicate and wretched variety of the English Walnut ( Jnglaus Regia) to be found any- 
where, that is the Los Angeles or common Ent;lish Walnut of California, the only kind prop- 
agated on the Pacific Coast, when, twenty years ago we first took hold of the \Valnut question 
and commenced the introduction in California of the choicest, hardiest and best known 
Walnut varieties of Europe. We have repeatedly called the attention of people in Cen- 
tral and Northern California and Oregon, who wondered why Walnut Trees, even at 30 
years kept completely barren, that this unproductiveness of the Los Angeles Walnut was 
due to its imperfect blooming ; the staminate flowers or catkins being fully out before 
the appearance on the trees of a single nut, and when the pistillate flowers or nuts were 
in bloom, not a solitary catkin lefc on the trees to fertilize the nuts, which, conse- 
quently, had to drop off after attaining the size of a large pea ; so it is through this ir- 
regularity in blooming, first explained by us over fifteen years ago, that the Los Angeles 
Walnut has proven to be barren, or at least so unproductive that it has induced many 
people in this State and Oregon to out down their trees because of their unproductive- 
ness, and, too, for not being hardy ; people having oome to the conclusion that their 
pait of the country was not adapted to Walnut-culture, while it was that worthless kind 
that was not adapted to our climate and that of Ore;»ou ; and it is the general planting 
on this coast of that barren and delicate kind of Walnut that has proved such a great 
drawback to Walnut culture It does not mutter if in those privileged little valleys bor- 
dering the sea in Southern California, this Los Angeles Walnut bears abundant crops ; it 
nevertheless remains a fact that north of Los Angeles that variety of Walnut does so 
badly that it has discouraged people in planting Walnut trees. 
But worst, or at least as bad yet, this kind of Walnut is so delicate that it is liable to 
be cut back by frost every year, either in the full or spring, and very often at both 
times. Mr. W. B. West of Stockton, a gentleman who has been taking much interest in 
Walnut culture in his part of the State, the San Joaquin valley, fully corroborates our 
statements in regard to the barrenness and sensibility to cold of the Los Angeles Wal- 
nut, in fact declaring it a failure in Northern California. 
" I have, such trees on my place," says Mr. West, " thirty feet high, twenty years 
old, which in the southern part of the State would be bearing abundant crops, that have 
never borne twenty nuts in a year ; this is the experience of most planters. Notwith- 
standing this well-established fact, nurserymen say that fully three-quarters of the Wal- 
nut trees sold by them are of this kind. I cannot occount lor this lack of information 
