92 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
CANKER INSPECTION 
F. M. O’Byrne 
Mr. Poole can vouch for the fact 
that I did not want to be put on the 
citrus canker committee report this af¬ 
ternoon. He has three letters from me 
on file, protesting against it. I assured 
him that there was nothing that I could 
add to the information presented; that 
there were already enough on the pro¬ 
gram and that every one would be tired 
out before I had a chance to talk. But 
thev were obdurate, so here I am. Now 
that I am here, I am determined fo have 
my say; you people have all been given an 
opportunity to escape and those who have 
remained must take their medicine. If 
you people are as sleepy as I am, I will 
have to adopt Billy Sunday methods to 
get you interested, so here goes. 
We will let this flower pot represent 
the imaginary line between Dade and 
Palm Beach counties. Four miles north 
of it is Pompano, where the Marshall 
grove is located. This is a twenty-acre 
grove, having 2000 trees in it. By esti¬ 
mate, 1800 of these 2000 trees have citrus 
canker. Mr. Marshall has always treated 
us courteously, but has been firm in his 
refusal to allow his trees to be burned. 
He is trying to eradicate the disease with 
a spray. He has tried four or five differ¬ 
ent formulas, but is keeping them secret. 
Unfortunately, this spray is very hard on 
the trees; it knocks off leaves, kills the 
twigs, and, most unfortunate of all, the 
canker is coming out on the new growth. 
About twenty miles north of Mr. Mar¬ 
shall’s grove is Boynton, where the Percy 
Collins grove is located. We destroyed 
sixty-three grove trees and two hundred 
nursery trees at the time of the first in¬ 
spection. The trees were literally cov¬ 
ered with canker. On re-inspections we 
have found and destroyed ten more trees. 
There are now forty-five left in the origi¬ 
nal grove of one hundred and nineteen 
trees. On the last four inspections, there 
has been no canker found. I am very 
hopeful that this grove has been cleaned 
up. 
About thirty-two miles north of Boyn¬ 
ton is North Jupiter Island. Mr. Isaac 
Weishuhn, 'who lives there, received a 
shipment of one hundred trees from Dade 
county, and fifty trees from a local nur¬ 
sery, and he planted a nursery of his own 
in his grove. At the time of our inspec¬ 
tion, eighty-five of the grove trees had the 
canker, and practically all, certainly three- 
fourths of the trees in his own nursery, 
were covered with it. 
Mr. Weishuhn is a very poor man who 
has homesteaded a place and earns his 
living as a fisherman, and had hoped to 
build up an orange grove upon which he 
could retire. But he realized that his 
grove was a menace to the people in his 
vicinity, and that re-inspection would be 
very expensive, so he allowed us to burn 
up every citrus tree in his grove. I con¬ 
sider that man a hero, and one of the 
greatest gentlemen in the State. 
Going about fifteen miles north, we 
