plants, perhaps too much so. Much honor and credit is due
to certain members of our association for their untiring work and
efforts in its behalf. It is not necessary to mention names as I am sure
most of you present know to whom I refer. Our annual reports testify to
their splendid work.

From this time forward I believe we should adopt the policy of boldly
advocating the planting of orchards of nut trees. The intending planter
will decide for himself what variety he will plant, and as a guide he
should judge from the wild varieties growing in his vicinity. By so
doing he cannot go very far astray in what will be to him a new venture.
Of course certain varieties will be restricted to certain limited areas.
This applies particularly to the introduced varieties, as distinguished
from the native nut-bearing trees.

The black walnut has a wider range than any of the other nut trees.
Travel wheresoever you will about the country and you will observe wild
black walnut trees growing almost on every farm. The planting of the
Persian, or English walnut, as it is more generally known, has had more
of a popular appeal, perhaps from the fact that we are accustomed to
seeing clean, smooth nuts of uniform size of that variety in almost
every grocery store, the kernels of which may be extracted without great
effort. The black walnut, on the other hand, has been tolerated as a
sort of poor relation, and has been given no particular attention,
because we have been used to seeing it around. It has not been made to
do its share of contributing towards its keep. Our earliest
recollections of it bring to mind bruised fingers as a result of our
endeavors to crack the nuts and the tedious work of manipulating a
darning needle to extract the kernels, which we usually picked to pieces
in the process. We now know that we simply did not have the right kind
of black walnuts. We should put our accumulated knowledge to practical
use to urge on every occasion the planting of nut orchards, especially
of approved varieties of the black walnut. This I understand is what the
United States Department of Agriculture is advocating, and we should
co-operate all we can with the department in that recommendation.

It will, no doubt, be urged that sufficient grafted black walnut trees
are not available for orchard planting on a large scale. This, no doubt,
is true, but on many farms there are wild black walnut trees of a size
suitable for grafting or top-wor