Chico
because it colors up so beautifully in the autumn and the spring. In the
spring the tips of these leaves and branches are a brilliant pink and in
the autumn it turns a gorgeous scarlet. It is destined to be one of the
best landscape trees of California in our opinion. It grows to be
centuries old.

Frank Meyer standing beside a tree which has stood three centuries at
least. Imagine what pleasure he would have had had he only lived to walk
under this great avenue in his old age.

The question of congeniality between the true pistache and the Chinese
pistache is shown here. We rather jumped to the conclusion, when we
found that the ordinary pistache overgrew the Chinese pistache, that
perhaps it was not so good a stock as we first thought, but I notice,
looking back at my photograph taken in Greece in 1901, that the regular
stocks used by the Greeks for the pistache are overgrown in the same way
by the true pistache. We have much larger trees than these now in Chico
and as the Chinese pistaches are very old and large trees we have come
to the conclusion that in all probability the pistache will be
successful on this Chinese stock.

I was walking through a market in Hong Kong in 1902 and I saw a few
bushels of nuts that I had never heard of or seen before. The nuts
looked like acorns but when I picked them up I found them as hard as
hickory nuts. I cracked one of them with a brick and it was almost as
hard to crack as a hickory nut. It was unmistakably an acorn, I thought,
and I bought a bushel of the nuts and sent them to this country. It is
called Pisania by botanists and it has many of the characteristics of an
acorn. The kernel of this nut comes out whole and for that reason it
would be very easily cracked by mechanical means. It has a sweetness
which does not suggest an acorn. It does not remind you of the acorn. It
is a commercial product in Southern China shipped down the West river
and it seemed to me well worth while trying to grow it in the United
States. We have had a great deal of trouble with it. We did not find the
right place for it at first. It was hardy here in Washington, even, for
a few seasons but the temperature at seventeen, eighteen and twenty
below zero finally killed it out. It is now growing down in Mississippi.

Here is a photograph sent me from Honkong, the only one I have of the
tree as it appears on the hills of Honkong. This tree which is now 11
feet tall on the place of Mr. Joe Wi