in a little town called Nevada City, California,
in the foothills of the Sierras. He had come over to this country
without a penny and had set up a barber shop in this little mining
village of Nevada City. He had saved from his fees for cutting people's
hair and shaving them, $3,000. He had bought a piece of barren hillside
which everybody laughed at him for buying; and he sent an order for
$2,500 worth of nut trees and fruit trees to a nursery firm in his old
home in France. He did this without even having an irrigating system
with which to irrigate those plants when they arrived. He told me with
tears in his eyes how he had worked night and day, carrying buckets of
water to save this collection of plants when it arrived from France.
When I visited Felix Gillett in his plantation there, which he called
the _Barren Hill Nursery_, I felt that I had never seen a more
delightful spot in my life. It was a kind of a paradise which he had
built up by his love for plants and his wonderful knowledge of the
varieties which he handled. He certainly was one of the great experts of
this country in the nut and fruit industry, particularly the nut
industry. It is his collection of hazelnuts which Mr. Reed spoke of as
having found its way into Mr. Quarnburg's hands. In fact I was at Mr.
Quarnburg's place a year ago last summer and learned that he got his
first start from this little French barber in the mountains of Nevada.

This is Felix Gillett standing beside the first Jordan almond tree in
America. The difficulty with the Jordan tree in this section was that it
flowered too early and too few crops were produced. We have tried a
good many sections for the almond and one of the problems, in my
opinion, is the development of stocks for it. Here is the IXL on one of
Meyer's Chinese stocks (_Amygdalus davidiana_). It does very well on
this stock in the region of San Antonio, Texas. But the future of this
almond business ought to have been told you by Meyer after he came back
from his trip in Western China. These bushes are of the Tangutian
almond, a little bush almond; growing occasionally 15 or 18 or 20 feet
in height and hardy. It was Meyer's plan, had he lived, to find some
place in Southwest Colorado in which to breed hardy almonds that would
cover those hillsides with a food producing plant. I believe had he
lived he would have done that for we have gotten together already for
the breeders a number of forms of great promise. Mr. W