e. It is unknown as a crop in
large areas in Europe, where it might be grown successfully. In Italy
there is only an occasional tree, and it is not grown much in Portugal
or Spain.

It has centers in Europe as crops have in the United States and for the
same reason--someone started the industry. The activities of Mr. Pomeroy
have stimulated its growth in his immediate locality. When any one
succeeds in a certain line, we find people about him taking up the same
line and they conclude that this product can only be produced in that
particular locality. This is usually not so at all. The thing that
happened was that some one showed them that this soil would produce this
thing. Near Naples there is a walnut boom. The value of the walnut as a
crop is shown by the fact that market gardens producing three crops a
year under irrigation are being planted to English walnuts. I have been
told time and again that this is a very profitable crop. In this walnut
district they have planted whole hillsides to olives and walnuts
alternately, sometimes mixed up, sometimes twenty acres solid. In some
places they can only be cultivated with the hoe, a very distinctly
un-American job, and yet the English walnut seems to pay the people
under those conditions of labor. It is spreading over that peninsula and
you find it spreading in the lowlands. They trim the tree up to
twenty-five feet, so that teams can drive below.

There are two important walnut areas in France; at one place an old
crank named Mayette about two hundred years ago found a good walnut and
he grafted some and planted out an acre or two, and his neighbors
planted some, especially when his acre or two began to grow, with the
result that the territory around that old man's planting is the center
of the production of the Grenoble walnut. A little strip, on the
foothills of the Alps and along the Isere river is sprinkled with walnut
trees. They are now planting these trees in the midst of the best
vineyards. In a field of wheat often-times you will find rows of little
walnut trees. There are some orchards of Persian walnuts in this
locality but I think no orchard has over five acres. They have come to
grief along a line that is common to most people, that of overcrowding.
It takes a great deal of nerve to plant a nut tree sixty or seventy feet
from the next--it looks as if it were wasting the land--and they have
planted them so close that the tops of the trees and the foliage for