THE PRESIDENT: What is that, Mr. Jones?
MR. JONES: I say I have not regarded the filbert blight as nearly as deadly as some of the blights that attack the fruit trees, because of the fact that it works very slowly, and it takes, I understand, about two years to girdle a limb of any size; therefore, it is easily cut out and controlled.
MR. CORSAN: Could it be that the blight would be very much more active in a tree growing in the shade than on one growing out in the strong sunlight and well nourished?
MR. VOLLERTSEN: I know of some trees that were for at least ten or eleven years practically overgrown by butternut trees. I have known the trees for more than thirty years. I visited the place about a week ago and found a tree doing fairly well under the circumstances. That tree is between thirty and forty years old and has grown steadily for the last five or six years entirely in the shade and is bearing fruit fairly well. There were quite a few nuts on it although there were more over the top than on the lower branches; but I did not notice any dead limbs or anything of that kind.
THE PRESIDENT: Do you refer to Doctor Mandel's plant?
MR. VOLLERTSEN: No.
DOCTOR MORRIS: Stamford is a natural home of the hazel. Wild hazels fill the fields to such an extent that they destroy pastures very often. Hazel blight, therefore, is to be found there as an indigenous organism or parasite. Among the native hazels it apparently attacks only those that have been injured or are weakened by age or otherwise. That is the common history where a plant has existed along with a parasite for centuries or ages, a certain amount of tolerance is established by the resistance of a few individual plants and the elimination of the others. By natural selection the best survives.
Now when I brought some European hazels to this place a little over twenty years ago they made a good start. In two or three years all were attacked with blight and at the end of four or five years all were dead. I spoke to Mr. Henry Hicks about it. He has a place on Long Island. Mr. Hicks said, "I have given up foreign hazels. They are no use. They all die. I don't try them." Whenever anybody says that to me it starts me right off doing it. When they said we couldn't graft hickories I said, "Well, here is something to do," and I did it. They said, "Well, we couldn't raise hazels; we might as well give up." I said, "Well, here is the best thing for us to do then." So again I got a small lot and observed them day by day. Very soon the blight began to attack them. I found it grew slowly and gave me plenty of time to cut it out. I neglected some purposely to see how long it would take the blight to girdle a limb and some of the larger limbs took two years. In all of the limbs that were affected, in the hazels which I wished to save, I simply cut out the blight with a sharp jackknife, painted the spot with a little paint, an antiseptic or something of the sort, and had complete control. In fact I found that I needed to go over my hazel bushes not more than once a year to look after the blight, and in one day, or part of a day, with a sharp jackknife I had absolute control of the blight.
There are some large European hazels that I have neglected and have allowed the blight to get under way. Some of them are so resistant that they bear very good crops notwithstanding the fact that they are neglected and have the blight. Others have died. Therefore it is a relative question, a question of relative immunity to the blight. My belief is that the blight will not be any more injurious to our hazels than the San Jose scale has been to the peaches. We have complete control of the San Jose scale because we know the habits of the scale insect. I believe we have complete control of the hazel blight because we know the habits of that particular sporella.
As to the question of growing in the shade or in the sunshine, on the Palmer property not very far from me, there are some very large bushes of red and white avellana and of the purple hazel that have been overshadowed by other trees because they haven't been looked after. Those are all very large bushes, in fact they have grown to be small trees and they are completely overshadowed by other things. They have some blight but continue year after year to bear heavy crops of nuts.