Maine, Buffalo, and western North Caro- 
lina, you probably remember your childish 
delight in seeing the brown shell of 
Chestnuts glistening in the autumn grass 
and leaves, the thrill of their smooth sur- 
face as your fingers picked them up, one 
after the other, and filled your pockets 
and your youthful appetite. 
Then you remember the blight, and the 
sickening sight of the bare arms of dead 
trees in field and forest. 
Now comes the third stage. You can 
pick up Chestnuts again, if you want to, 
and you don’t have long to wait, for we 
now have Blight Resistant Chestnut trees 
all ready for you to plant out in your 
yard next spring, and they will bear 
quickly. Their precocity is a surprise. 
The blight came from China, and thus 
far no single American Chestnut tree has 
been found completely resistant to it, al- 
though many thousands of them still 
linger on, throwing out generation after 
generation of suckers to be stricken down 
by the blight when they have got from 
10 to 20 feet high. 
To get around this difficulty we have 
secured seed and trees of the Chinese 
Chestnut, which has lived for an unknown 
period of time with the blight and is there- 
fore experienced in the difficult art of 
outliving it. They are blight resistant, 
but we cannot say that they are blight 
proof. Neither can we say that of apples. 
Thousands of Chinese Chestnut trees 
have been grown in this country from im- 
ported seed, and the usual horticultural 
process has been applied to them. The best 
single trees from many thousands have 
been selected. Scions from these genius 
trees have been grafted into common roots, 
and thus we can have orchards of the 
genius nut trees exactly as we have of 
fruit orchards. 
The test orchards of these Oriental 
Chestnuts and their hybrids show an al- 
most unbelievable variety of trees and 
nuts—little, big, and middle-sized; sterile, 
prolific; bitter, sweet; worthless, grand. 
Out of the thousands a few varieties have 
been selected—varieties that are declared 
to be as good as any American Chestnut 
ever was, and this by United States De- 
partment of Agriculture experts who have 
no axes to grind, nothing to sell, only 
their reputations to maintain and the in- 
dustry to aid, 
The Chestnut is the most precocious 
and productive nut tree known to the 
Temperate Zone. Nearly all those that are 

considered worthy of propagation bear 
every year. Some of them bear heavily 
every year. They can be depended upon to 
bear as soon as apples, some of them 
sooner. For example, in walking through 
my nursery I have picked nuts from 
grafted trees the third summer after 
grafting, when the trees were only 
shoulder high. This is not common, but it 
happens often enough to show what the 
varieties are like. 
The Northern Limit of the Chinese 
Chestnut 
Just how far north will the Chinese 
Chestnuts thrive? Will they thrive at 
your place? I wish I could answer these 
questions with exact and mathematical 
accuracy, but I cannot, so I give you all 
the facts I now have and leave the matter 
for you to work out. 
After twenty years of experience I have 
never, so far as I know, lost a single 
Chestnut tree from winterkilling on my 
Blue Ridge Mountain slope in the Phila- 
delphia climate. Chinese Chestnut trees 
have thriven and borne for years in Con- 
necticut, some in Massachusetts, a few 
in southern Vermont. At the same time 
we get reports of complete winterkilling 
in those same areas and latitudes. Why 
this difference? There are three main 
reasons. 
One is: Does your land happen to be in 
a frost pocket? Few persons realize the 
profound climatic difference that may 
exist between your house and the meadow 
that lies a short distance below it and 
happens to have poor air drainage. The 
figures on page 6 show an almost un: 
believable difference of temperature on a 
cold night. Indeed, the range was more 
than 12° F. in 200 feet difference in ele- 
vation—the difference in temperature be- 
tween 33° (which did not freeze) and 
21°, which if kept on long enough would 
have made ice thick enough to skate upon. 
I know two innocent looking fields near 
Washington, D. C. They are in a warmer 
climate than my Blue Ridge Mountain, 
but on one of them Chestnuts (which live 
perfectly for me) winterkill from time to 
time because it is a frost pocket, and on 
the other field, a short distance away, they 
do not winterkill, because it does not 
happen to be a frost pocket. 
The frost pocket trees will get much 
lower temperatures on still nights in mid- 
winter. Trees in a frost pocket will have 
