A Good Lawn Tree 
Many people for some unknown rea- 
son cover their lawns with maples, 
which annihilate the grass with their 
dense foliage and multitude of surface 
roots. The Shagbark, like the Walnut 
and the Pecan, being a deep rooter, lets 
grass grow up close to it. Also its tall 
cylindrical shape is an aid to the grass, 
and it gives the trees a very distinctive 
and pleasing appearance. 
Fertilizing the Shagbark 
Do not let the Shagbark deceive you 
by the fact that it grows naturally on 
upland soils. It likes fertilizer. Its 
bearing is likely to be very greatly in- 
fluenced by the amount of plant food. 
There have been some startling results 
following the application of an abund- 
ance of phosphorous fertilizer to Shag- 
barks and other nut trees of the Hick- 
ory family. Therefore, I would suggest 
that you give the tree liberal supplies 
of fertilizer high in phosphorous and 
potash. If the tree is 20 feet high I 
would recommend 10 pounds of a com- 
mercial mixture of 4-12-4 or even 4- 
12-8, and if it is a 30-foot tree, give it 
15 pounds, at least every other year. 
You are likely to be abundantly re- 
warded. 
Shagbark Varieties. (See price list.) 
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 pro- 
duce 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 North- 
ern Nut Growers Association’s contests 
are hybrids, and fortunately one of the 
characteristics 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 
13 
the purebreds, and two of them which 
I have for sale are much more pre- 
cocious and prolific than the purebreds. 
These two varieties, the Fairbanks and 
the Stratford, are both natives of Iowa. 
Both appear to be at least half Shag- 
bark. 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 gratify- 
ing, 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 has lived and 
ripened in the 40-50 degrees below zero 
area near Minneapolis. 
The experimenter who is going to 
graft wild trees should by all means 
use a few Stratford. They are so en- 
couraging 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 
producing a good crop for six years, 
including drought years, but the trees 
were manured once. 
A farmer’s wife of my acquaintance 
has a local reputation for nut salad— 
Fairbanks nuts, tree from my Nursery. 
The Hiccan 
The Pecan also indulges in this nat- 
ural-hybridizing business, and, being a 
Hickory, there are some natural hy- 
brids of Pecan and other Hickories. 
These are called Hiccans and I offer 
some of them which show their hybrid 
character by growing almost as rap- 
idly 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 bear- 
ers. On that account I have discarded 
some despite their beauty and speed 
of growth (see price list), but am grow- 
ing some of proved productivity. 
The English (Persian) Walnut 
(Juglans Regia) 
The trees that give us this delicious 
nut are supposed to be natives of Per- 
sia, from which center they have spread 
both east and west and circumnavi- 
gated the globe. I have seen them in 
in Japan, Korea, China, the valleys of 
the Himalayas, Persia, Palestine, Syria, 
