at orchard for a few minutes, there were 38 plantings of from
10 to 50 trees each made by the Soil Conservation Service and the
Division of Forest Pathology of the Bureau of Plant Industry in the
spring of 1939. These were examined by Dr. Diller of that Bureau in the
spring of 1940 and in 1947. He has told us that he graded those
plantings as he found them, 10 being good, and he said the next 15 were
only fair and he put 13 down as total failures.

Of those 13 that failed--from the forestry standpoint now, remember--he
said that 7 of the failures were due to poor site selection, three were
suppressed by surrounding hardwoods and other competing growth, and
three had been destroyed by cattle.

[Footnote 1: Meaning, two years old, not transplanted in the
nursery.--Ed.]

+A Commercial Chestnut Nurseryman+

I don't know whether any of you know of--I expect you do--the Gold
Chestnut Nursery in West Virginia near Cowen, and it is owned and
operated by Mr. Arthur A. Gold. He has been interested in
blight-resistant chestnuts from a commercial standpoint, selling from
his nursery for a good many years. He has worked with us some in the
Conservation Commission and has given us the benefit of his experience.
And if any of you have the opportunity I think you would be interested
in seeing Mr. Gold's nursery. He was an old-time nurseryman that handled
most of the conifers found in a commercial nursery, but in the last few
years he has gone into chestnut production almost entirely, and if you
have an opportunity, I am sure Mr. Gold would welcome you to his nursery
in Webster County.

The Game Division of the Conservation Commission of West Virginia
established three or four small plantings on the state forests in 1938
and 1939, but they had low survival. Dr. Diller in going around with
some of us and checking on those has found that we were back there where
all of us were trying to find something and trying to learn something
and that we made many mistakes and that we picked poor stock, for one
thing, and poor sites for another thing, but the great disadvantage and
the biggest limiting factor was our poor selection of sites there in the
beginning.

In handling chestnuts that you people handle maybe in small or large
quantities where all of your time can be devoted to that particular
thing, you probably have a lot of things that you do that we don't have
time to do because at the nursery in West Virginia we are interested
pr