ident L. H. MacDaniels
presiding.)

Persian Walnuts in the Upper South

H. F. STOKE, _Roanoke, Va._

My experience with the Persian walnut has been acquired in the Roanoke
district of south-west Virginia. It is located 300 miles from the
Atlantic seaboard and my trees are at an approximate elevation of eleven
hundred feet. Roanoke is on the same parallel as Springfield, Missouri,
and about thirty miles south of Rockport, Indiana.

This experience covers a period of more than twenty years with named
varieties and seedlings of the species. I shall here attempt to present
some findings that may be of some value to others similarly located.

For the sake of brevity I shall put the cart before the horse, the
findings before the facts from which they are derived.

For the upper south and, in my opinion, for the middle west, late
vegetating and blossoming is of prime importance for success with the
Persian walnut. No matter how vigorous, prolific and precocious the tree
may be, nor how fine the nuts, the variety is worthless for anything
except shade if the crop is destroyed by normal spring frosts.

In the second place is winter hardiness. This is of two kinds;
resistance to extreme cold, and resistance to the wooing of warm winter
days that starts premature activity, followed by a destructive freeze.

My experience with the Payne variety is a case in point. Having read
some place of the vigor, precocity and heavy bearing of the new variety,
then called the Payne Seedling, I secured some scions of it from its
originator and worked it on a young black walnut. The variety was
already making a name for itself in Northern California and Oregon, not
only because of its bearing habits but for the superb quality of its
nuts.

During the first few years it did well despite its early starting in the
spring, and bore heavy crops; then disaster fell. One spring the tree
failed to leaf out at the usual time. On examination I found that it had
winter-killed back to five-year wood. The winter had been unusually
cold, and the tree could not take it. Pruned back, the belated new
growth did not fully mature before winter so in turn was damaged, a
phenomenon that recurred from year to year. Exit Payne as a Virginia
prospect.

An example of the other type of winter injury was that of my first Crath
Carpathian. I secured scions of this variety from Rev. P. C. Crath in
1929. The parent tree had been growing and bearing in the vi