damage done by the yellow bellied sap
sucker bird caused me the loss of all except one variety, the Gellatly.
This variety I have perpetuated by re-grafting on other black walnut
stocks and by spraying and covering the limbs with screen to prevent the
sap sucker from working on it, still have it in the nursery and at my
home in St. Paul where a young tree on the boulevard bears each year.
I have found that heartnuts are difficult to propagate, the number of
successful grafts I have made being far below that of black walnuts on
black walnut stocks. The reason for this is not well understood any more
than is the fact, in my experience, that the Stabler walnut will graft
readily and the Ten Eyck persistently refuses to. A good feature that
these grafted trees do have, however, is their early productiveness. I
have seen them set nuts the second year after grafting and this has also
occurred in trees I have sold to others.
When a nut of J. sieboldiana cordiformis is planted, it does not
reliably reproduce itself in true type, sometimes reverting to that of
the ordinary Japanese walnut, which looks more like a butternut and has
a rather rough shell as distinguished from the smooth shell of the
heartnut. In hulling my heartnut crop for 1940, I noticed many deformed
nuts.
The season had been a prolific one for nut production of all kinds, and
I knew there had been a mixture of pollen in the air at the time these
nutlets were receptive (a mixture made up largely of pollen from black
walnuts, butternuts, with some English walnuts). Since irregularities in
size and shape indicate hybridity frequently and since heartnuts are
easily hybridized I have assumed that these were pollinized by the
mixture. I have planted these odd-shaped nuts and I expect them to
result in many new crosses of J. sieboldiana cordiformis, some five to
eight years from now.
[Illustration: _Beautiful tropical looking Japanese Walnut (Juglans
sieboldiana cordiformis). Variety Gellatly, from Westbank, B. C.,
Canada. Photo by C. Weschcke._]
To show how nature reacts to much interference I will follow through on
these nearly 100 small trees that resulted from this pollination. They
were transplanted into an orchard on a side hill and well taken care of
for several years, but during that time one after another was killed,
apparently by winter conditions or perhaps the site was too exposed or
the soil may have been uncongenial. Today there remains but th
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