THE OTHER WALNUTS 193
The wood, unfortunately, is soft and of little value, but we can scarcely expect one tree to have all the virtues until after breeding work has been done.
The Japanese walnut merits much attention at the hands of plant breeders. It is at present in rather bad repute because ignorant or unprincipled nurserymen have scattered its seedlings widely over the United States, calling it the English walnut; but the specimens were only seedlings of no particular merit. The result of this deception has been to dampen the ardor of many planters. Other nurserymen, in good faith, sold seedling trees produced from nuts borne on Japanese walnut trees in this country. These trees turned out to be hybrids that could scarcely be distinguished from butternuts. They had resulted from the very active hybridizing susceptibilities of Japanese trees growing within the wind-blown pollen range of butternut trees. It seems almost as if the Japanese walnut chooses butternut pollen rather than its own if it has the chance.
The heart nut, of which grafted trees are now available in
cial encouragement but produces annually four bushels of nuts." (Letter. Joseph H. Willits. Professor of Industry. University of Pennsylvania. October 10, 1912.)
"We found that the Japanese walnut was happy from the start, and three years after planting produced an abundance of nuts combining the good qualities of both the American butternut and the black walnut, with meat much thicker than the butternut and not nearly so oily, an improvement on the black walnut and butternut as well, and a vast improvement on these trees in respect to leafing, as the Jap is one of the earliest trees to put out its leaves in the spring, far ahead of the black walnut of equal size and at a much more tender age. It is one of the most interesting trees we have because of its bloom at the end of the branches and its marvelously long, plump catkins scattered along the trunk, and the nuts, instead of being formed singly, are produced on long stems like an elongated bunch of grapes, having as many as twenty-two nuts on a stalk." (Long Island Agronomist. Vol. VI. No. 6. January 1, 1913.)
"Mrs. R. S. Purdy, 218 South Willard Avenue. Phoebus. Virginia, has the j, seiboldiana sample I sent you. The year that I was at Lancaster (1912) I visited this tree; it was then eighteen years old and bore that year sixteen bushels of shelled or rather hulled nuts. ...
"They grow in clusters of twenty-four nuts. The tree was planted by a little girl twenty years ago from a nut she got from a sailor at Old Point Comfort. The tree is about a foot in diameter. It is very powerfully rooted." (Letter. G. H. Corsan. University of Toronto. December 23, 1914.)
