THE CHAIRMAN: As a horticulturist along experimental lines I find the trouble is to get people to plant trees and properly plant them. I do not think that the average farmer knows how to plant trees. That is why they get such poor results. They plant them where anybody with intelligence would not plant them. We find in the South that we can grow trees if there is protection against fire and stock. If fire is kept out and stock is kept from grazing, nature will cover the land with forest trees. I think that will go a long way to getting nut trees. But a man planting something as valuable as a nut tree wants to take a little more pains than that. I have seen Mr. Littlepage's place where he is raising handsome trees, but he has planted crops around each tree and there is plenty of plant food. You can grow trees almost anywhere if you make the conditions favorable. In hedge rows and odd places, if the forest soil is preserved, you can grow almost any kind of a nut tree. These conditions must prevail or we must make them prevail.
Just another point on the matter of home planting. I wouldn't be a very good preacher if I didn't carry out my own practices. Just to show my faith by my works I want to say that I took out every shade tree at home and put a nut tree in its place. Down south where shade is very valuable they said "that man is very foolish to cut down nice elms and maples like that and put nut trees in their place." It did look so then for a while. Now I have some handsome pecans and Persian walnuts and Japanese walnuts, and this year I get my first dividends from a tree five years old. Of course we have taken care to preserve their symmetry, but I think our nut trees come pretty close to being our best shade tree. I will challenge anybody to find a handsomer tree than a well-grown pecan. It is a very stalwart tree with its branches of waving foliage, which is the characteristic of an ideal shade tree, and yet, in addition to that, it produces in the fall magnificent nuts. So the proposition of home planting is one that pays quick dividends on attention given. I think I have convinced my neighbors that it is a good deal better to raise handsome nut trees than poplars. My neighbor planted Carolina poplars at the same time. He was out there the other morning raking up the leaves and that is all he will have to do until Christmas time.