AMERICAN CHESNUT. 
9 
sarj to procure a few stocks to furnish grafts for young Wild Chesnuts 
transplanted from the woods or reared in the nursery.* 
The Chesnuts may he grafted by inoculation or the insertion of a shoot. 
The common method is by lopping a branch of the wild tree, removing a 
girdle of the bark near the end, from 1 to 3 inches wide, and replacing it 
by another from a limb of the cultivated stock of corresponding diameter. 
The lower edge of the new covering is exactly adjusted to the natural bark, 
but a portion of the limb is left exposed above, which is scraped down so 
as to form a species of tent or dressing, and the whole is protected from 
the weather by a coating of clay. 
PLATE CIV. 
Leaves and aments of the natural size. Fig. 1, Full-grown fruit. Fig. 2, 
A chesnut. 
[Emerson has given the following dimensions of Chesnut trees in Massa- 
chusetts, viz. : one on the land of Joseph Houghton with an erect undi- 
vided trunk of 40 or 50 feet and several large branches above, which 
measured in 1840, 21 feet 3 inches in circumference at the surface : another 
22 feet 8 inches : one is mentioned in Hopkinton which measured in 1826 
25 J feet : another southeast of Monument mountain had attained in 1844 
at the surface, 30 feet 3 inches in circumference. Still more remarkable 
specimens no doubt exist further south, of whose measurements I have no 
record.] 
* The European cultivated Chesnut is now grown in the United States ; at Burlington, 
New Jersey, there are 16 trees in the grounds of Mr. Askew which have produced in one year 
16 bushels of these fine nuts which sold readily for 6 to 8 dollars the bushel. — (See also Nuttall’s 
(Supplement, Vol. I. p. 2.) 
Vol. III. — 3 
