Hybrid Hickories 
“What kind of a Hickory is this?” I 
ask an expert botanist when I get him out 
in my woods. “Well,” he says, slowly and 
thoughtfully, “the nut looks something 
like a Mockernut (Carya alba), but the 
leaf is not exactly a Mockernut leaf, and 
the bark looks like Tightbark Pignut 
(Carya glabra).” Then his friend the 
other botanist says, “But look at the 
number of leaflets and the shape of those 
branches.” The fact is, the tree is probably 
a hybrid—a natural hybrid. Indeed, many 
of the species of our forest trees mix 
rather freely with each other and produce 
hybrid offspring. Owing to the laws of 
genetics, the seedlings from these hybrid 
trees revert again and make trees like 
either parent and not like themselves. 
Many of the nuts that have come in as 
candidates for prizes in the Northern Nut 
Growers Association’s contests are hy- 
brids, and fortunately one of the char- 
acteristics of some hybrid trees is great 
vigor of growth, I find that in testing out 
varieties by topworking them on wild 
trees in the woods the hybrids are much 
easier to graft than the purebreds, and 
two of them which I have for sale are 
much more precocious and prolifie than 
the purebreds. These two varieties, the 
Fairbanks and the Stratford, are both 
natives of Towa, Both appear to be at 
least half Shagbark. Both of them begin 
to bear in the third or fourth season after 
being grafted on the wild tree in the 
woods, and a grafted nursery tree will 
bear as soon as apple trees or even sooner 
than some, if properly fed. 
The flavor of these nuts is gratifying, 
and if you have room for several trees you 
should certainly have one of each. They 
seem to be as hardy as pure Shagbarks 
and can be planted in its range. For the 
lawn they have all the virtues of the true 
Shagbark. The Fairbanks grows almost as 
rapidly as a maple tree. Fairbanks las 
lived and ripened in the 40-50 degrees be- 
low zero area near Minneapolis. 
The experimenter who is going to graft 
wild trees should by all means use a few 
Stratford. They ave so encouraging to the 
beginner—easy to graft, and they bear so 
soon, and they keep it up year after year. 
Some of mine, top-worked on wild trees in 
a rocky cow pasture, have not missed pro- 
ducing a good crop for six years, inelud- 
ing drought years, but the trees were 
manured once. 
13 
A farmer’s wife of my acquaintance has 
a local reputation for nut salad—Fair- 
banks nuts, tree from my Nursery. 
The Hiccan 
The Pecan also indulges in this natural- 
hybridizing business, and, being a Hick- 
ory, there are some natural hybrids of 
Peean and other Hickories. These are 
called Hiccans and JI offer some of 
them which show their hybrid character 
by growing almost as rapidly as maple 
trees. That old idea that all nut trees are 
slow growers certainly does not apply to 
these Hiccans. 
Some trees of this parentage grow 
with great speed. They have rich, dark 
foliage, but most of them are shy bearers. 
On that account I have discarded some 
despite their beauty and _ speed of 
growth. (See price list.) 
The English (Persian) Walnut 
(Juglans Regia) 
The trees that give us this delicious 
nut are supposed to be natives of Persia, 
from which center they have spread both 
east and west and circumnavigated the 
globe. I have seen them in Japan, Korea, 
China, the valleys of the Himalayas, 
Persia, Palestine, Syria, Turkey, and then 
right across Europe from Constantinople 
to Edinburgh by way of Bulgaria, Yugo- 
slavia, Italy, Switzerland, France, Ger- 
many, England. In the eastern United 
States they are scattered from Massa- 
chusetts to Illinois, from New York to 
North Carolina, while we have a 
thoroughly established industry with 
many orchards on the Pacific coast, chiefly 
in California. 
The finest trees I ever saw were in 
a valley of the Taurus Mountains in 
southern Turkey, while the ruins of 
the Roman city of Baalbek in Syria are 
howered in splendid Persian Walnut trees. 
To the eastern United States this tree is 
a foreigner. It is a native of a climate 
with a mild winter and a dry summer, 
somewhat like that of California. This 
may explain the puzzling experience that 
many people have had with it in the 
eastern parts of the United States. 
There are thousands of trees, nearly all 
seedlings, therefore each one a law to 
itself, scattered over the country, east of 
