at home. Here the present system of agriculture may remain absolutely intact, but supplemented by many million bushels of Persian walnuts and American black walnuts or hickory nuts or honey locust beans or acorns produced by trees standing in spots of land that the plow cannot touch.
X. FENCE ROWS AND ODD CORNERS OF LAND
Every farm even in the flattest, blackest prairie of Illinois has some corners of land that are not cultivated and where the tree lover can make a few trials without interfering with the main business of the farm. There is the lawn. The beautiful (but worthless) elms, the fruitless sycamores and boxelders and the maples—oh. Lord! how many are the maples that throw down worthless leaves upon our pathways! To ornament the home nothing is more beautiful than the hickories and the pecans, and the various walnuts certainly rank high in esthetic value. They all have the additional charms of intellectual interest and a probability of nuts.
Then also there is the roadside. In France and Germany tens of thousands of roadside walnut trees and roadside plum trees belong to the local government. The annual crop is sold on the tree, and a substantial saving of taxes results. Since in America the roadside land belongs to the owner, this is a possible source of income or a place of experimentation for those to whom land is scarce.
The fence rows within the farm are even better than the roadside for experimental planting. On thousands of American farms the fence rows are almost lined with trees. In sections of northern Virginia, where I lived as a boy, it is not at all uncommon for farms of two hundred acres to have from fifty to two hundred trees scattered along their division fences and roadsides or even standing in the fields. Many of the trees are almost worthless, although some are the post-giving locust.
A square farm of one hundred and sixty acres has two miles of boundary fence. If divided into four fields, it has at least,
