the Mississippi River, north of the Cotton 
Belt and south of upper New England and 
upper Michigan. Encouraged by one of 
these examples someone buys a tree from 
a nursery (as I did), probably a seedling 
of unknown origin, and it usually dies. Yet 
there is that old tree in So-and-so’s yard 
nearby that lives and bears crops of good 
nuts. Why did the nursery tree die? Then 
the tree planter hears that English Wal- 
nuts are growing on the shores of Lake 
Ontario. Hope rises again. He gets a tree 
from that area, and it may die in Mary- 
land of what is called winterkill, when it 
had not done so on the shore of Lake 
Ontario. 
Why these puzzling troubles? The an- 
swer is now reasonably well known. He 
has violated one of the three English Wal- 
nut “Musts” which are not difficult to 
follow if we just know. The three English 
Walnut “Musts” for the eastern United 
States are: 
First “Must”: Get the right variety. 
The first attempt by the uninitiated to 
get the right English Walnut variety has 
usually been to get a good nut and plant 
it. That is the way I began. Now it so 
happens that the English Walnut tree 
seems to have an almost greater affinity 
for the pollen of some other species than 
for its own. For years a famous Walnut 
tree stood in Berks County, Pa., produc- 
ing fine crops of good nuts. The thrifty 
Pennsylvania German farmers carried 
them away by the thousand and planted 
them out, and they invariably got on their 
trees a sharp, spiny-hulled nut that re- 
sembled a butternut. The reason was that 
this English Walnut tree was pollinated 
regularly by a butternut tree that stood 
about a quarter of a mile away to the 
northwest, 
My first nut tree was an English Wal- 
nut seedling. The parent tree is still 
bearing good nuts, but my seedling froze 
the first winter. I wonder what its father 
was? 
To get the right kind of an English Wal- 
nut tree you must get a grafted tree. 
There has been much search among the 
thousands of trees growing in the United 
States. Some reliable parent trees with 
high quality nuts have been found. One 
of them, the Wiltz-Mayette, has proved 
hardy in many an Eastern experimental 
planting. I have seen small trees of this 
variety from my own nursery hanging 
with as full a crop of nuts as a Black 
Walnut tree near by was bearing. 
I have Wiltz-Mavette trees grafted on 
Black Walntit roots, and also a very 
promising new variety called Broadview, 
the parent tree of which grew from a nut 
brought to this country by a man from 
Odessa, Russia. This tree vindicates its 
Russian origin by surviving 28° F. below 
zero in British Columbia, and it may in 
a few years be regarded as the best of all 
English Walnuts for frost land. 
Second “Must”: The soil must be right, 
that is, fertile, well drained and carry- 
ing as much lime as is necessary for sweet 
clover or alfalfa, namely pH 6.5 to pH 7.0. 
This lime requirement is not unnatural 
when one considers that virtually all the 
soils in countries having the semiarid 
climate in which this tree originated are 
somewhat alkaline. 

An English Walnut tree on a lawn in Washington, D. C. 
14 
