THIRTY-THIRD BlKNNIAI, SESSION 
Seedling vs. Budded or Grafted Trees. 
On seeing named varieties of pecans for the first time one is: almost 
invariably delighted with their large size, fine appearance, and splendid 
quality. If you hand some of them to a friend and tell him to try how good 
they are, I have noticed that he will not eat them but invariably puts them 
away carefully in his safest pocket, saying that he is going to take them 
home and plant them so that he can raise some fine pecans like that. He 
may propose to raise fine pecans in this way, but Old Dame Nature usually 
disposes otherwise. It is posible that a large fine nut can produce a tree that 
will bear large fine nuts, but in practice it scarcely ever does. In the same 
way a stone from an Elberta peach may produce a tree that bears peaches 
as fine as its Elberta parent, but most everybody now-a-days knows the 
resulting tree will almost invariably have small, tough, clingstone peaches. 
In short, the peach does not “come true” from seed, but neither will the 
pecan, pear, apple or any other of our fruits. 
It seems natural to expect that large thin-shelled nuts will produce 
trees bearing the same kind or at least similar nuts. This is where the 
rub comes in for after waiting a decade or score of years it is generally 
found that the tree bears small or bitter nuts. The bitter and astringent 
qualities of some pecans are probably due to their crossing with their cousins 
the bitter nuts (Hicoria aquatica). Bitter nuts and pecans cross very 
readily and give a race of seedlings producing nuts with a mixture of the 
characteristics of the pecan and the bitter nut. The hickories are also 
cousins of the pecan tree and cross with it giving rise to a race of trees 
producing the nuts called hicans. The nuts from isolated pecan trees pro- 
ducing large nuts would be more likely to come true because they would 
more possibly be fertilized with their own pollen. Even in this case they 
might by the law of atavism revert to some remote ancestor that bore very 
small thick-shelled nuts. 
The only way to be sure of growing good pecans is to do as we would 
with any other fruit and plant grafted trees. Grafting and budding are horti- 
cultural long division, for they make new individuals ad infinitum by simply 
dividing the original one. An orchard planted with budded or grafted 
Stuart trees will all have the same habit of growth, texture of foliage, shape, 
size and color of nut and the same full, meaty, fine-flavored kernel as the 
original Stuart tree. There are now over a hundred standard varieties of 
pecans which have been named and are being propagated and sold like other 
fruit trees. This has stimulated the planting and growing of pecans in 
commercial orchards. There are now thousands and thousands of pecan trees 
being planted in orchards every year in the Southern States. Some of the 
older plantings are bearing and it will not be long until the painted seed- 
ling nuts will give place to standard high class varieties that will be known 
and called for in markets like Winesap apples or Elberta peaches. 
