e plants them on rough and
hilly land, difficult to cultivate, pasturing with sheep, and has had
very good success. He does not worry about the chestnut blight, since
the chestnut is not native here and there is such a great distance
between the blight ridden East and Illinois.

Mr. Buckman was an amateur horticulturist, in the work for the love of
it. On his land he had nearly two thousand varieties of apples and
hundreds of varieties of peaches, plums, pears, cherries, grapes, small
fruits, and nuts collected from all over the world. I was much
interested to study the fine pecan and chestnut trees growing and
producing good crops as well as the persimmon and papaw trees, of which
he had a number of rare varieties. I was able last spring to secure
cuttings of a number of rather rare papaw varieties which I sent to
Doctor Zimmerman for propagation at the request of Doctor Fairchild.

Mr. Buckman recently died and there is now a movement on foot to secure,
either through the University or the Horticultural Society, as far as
possible, all the valuable data which he had been collecting for years.

There are several other men interested in nuts as a commercial
proposition in Illinois, such as O. H. Casper of Anna and Judge W. O.
Potter of Marion. I recently visited these orchards. Mr. Casper has
mostly pecans and walnuts growing in sod. They are from six to eight
years old and would have borne this season if weather conditions had
been favorable.

Judge Potter has over twenty acres of pecans interplanted with chestnuts
and filberts. For part of the orchard this is the fifth growing season.
The trees are growing vigorously and make a very impressive showing. I
counted thirty-nine nuts on a representative Thomas black walnut tree.
The filberts look especially promising. Although the weather at blooming
time was unfavorable a fair crop of nearly a peck was gathered from four
or five bushes of a late blooming imported variety. Judge Potter is also
growing another orchard using apples as fillers between black walnut
trees. This experiment will be watched with great interest since it will
be of great value in showing future possibilities in nut growing in
Illinois.

Now as to some of the things we are trying to do at the experiment
station at Urbana. This will be necessarily a progress report. I am
making a survey of the state to find promising individuals of the
different species and varieties and marking them for future u