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, and they will 
bear quickly. Their precocity is a sur- 
prise. 
The blight came from China, and 
thus far no single American Chestnut 
tree has been found completely resist- 
ant to it, although many thousands of 
them still linger on, throwing out gen- 
eration 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 un- 
known period of time with the blight 
and is therefore experienced in the dif- 
ficult art of outliving it. They are 
blight resistant. 
The U. S. Department of Agriculture 
has made many importations and has 
distributed seedlings by the thousands, 
for testing. This has been going on 
for more than 30 years and Chinese 
Chestnuts are now thriving from north- 
eastern Massachusetts through most 
of New York State, southern Ontario, 
southern Michigan, to Iowa and south- 
ern Wisconsin, and southward to south- 
ern Georgia. I have sold thousands of 
them throughout this area during the 
last fifteen years. As a result of travels 
in China I have also made five large 
importations of seed and I am de- 
lighted to report that I have one strain 
of seedings that is absolutely blight 
proof. In this respect as in many 
others there is great variation in the 
species—as there is in the apples. 
From the thousands of Chinese 
Chestnut trees that have been grown 
in this country from imported seed, 
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 
treets, 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 
almost unbelievable variety of trees 
and nuts—little, big, and middle-sized; 
sterile, prolific; bitter, sweet; worth- 
A grafted Chinese Chestnut tree in 
nursery. Note the many burrs. The boy 
holding the sheet is just 5 feet tall. 
Such productivity is not uncommon. 
less, grand. Out of the thousands a 
few varieties have been selected—va- 
rieties that are declared to be as good 
as any American Chestnut ever was, 
and this by United States Department 
of Agriculture experts who have no 
axes to grind, nothing to sell, only 
their reputations to maintain and the 
industry to aid. 
The Chestnut is the most precocious 
and productive nut tree known to the 
Temperate Zone. 
Those that I propagate 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, even 
the second summer after grafting, when 
the trees were only shoulder high. This 
is not common, but it happens every 
year. 
The U. S. Department of Agriculture 
has now released the Nanking, which 
they consider the best of their selec- 
