MR. WILKINSON: That gavel was made from the wood of a pecan tree. Mr. T.
P. Littlepage planted the nut when he was 14 years old on a piece of
land that he inherited as a boy. I cut the wood and sent it to him in
Washington to have the gavel made of it.

Chestnut Breeding

Report for 1951-1952

ARTHUR H. GRAVES[18] and HANS NIENSTAEDT, Connecticut Agricultural
Experiment Station, New Haven, Conn.

Weather Conditions

Two serious enemies of the chestnut, if we disregard parasitic organisms, are drought and extreme cold. The winter of 1950-51 was unusually mild—scarcely cold enough to freeze the ground. The precipitation was plentiful during the winter months so that the water table was sufficient to tide over a slightly dry June and a much more serious drought in September and early October. But the latter dry period came when the nuts were matured, or nearly so.

The winter of 1951-52 was again mild except for a short cold spell at the end of January, with plentiful precipitation up to the first week of June, and then a long drought with the driest July since 1944. However, the heavy rainfall of August, 8.69 inches,[19] made amends for this, and with the normal rainfall of 3.48 inches of September, prepared the trees to endure the long drought of October and early November. This serious drought,[20] which resulted in disastrous forest fires filling the air with smoke over much of the New England States, came late, however, after the nuts were nearly matured, some of the early kinds being ripe as early as the first week in September.

The excessive heat of July, in which month occurred the greatest number of days on record with a maximum temperature of 90 degrees or above, was probably the chief cause of somewhat smaller results from our cross pollination work. There is evidence, indeed, that for effective fertilization, considerable heat is needed, but not the extreme temperatures that occurred during this period.

In spite of the mild winter of 1951-52, the attacks of Cryptodiaporthe castanea (Tul.) Wehmeyer caused considerable twig blight, especially on our crosses of Castanea mollissimax seguini. This is not surprising since C. seguini comes from a warmer region in China, but why these attacks should occur during a mild winter is a puzzle. Evidently other factors, such as the drought of the preceding fall, entered in.

Hybridization in 1951 and 1952