The pines and allied conifers like Araucaria and Podocarpus will take their respective places in furnishing food supply for us all when the need comes. Such need is already close upon our new vista of war supplies. The squirrels and mice this year will eat thousands of tons of good food that our soldiers would be glad to have. The particular advantage in planting nut bearing pines rests in the fondness of these trees for waste places where little else will grow, and they need less attention perhaps than any other trees of the nut bearing group. For purposes of convenience in description I shall group all of the conifers together under the head of pines in this paper, although in botany the word "Pinus" is confined to generic nomenclature.
Up to the present time we have not even developed our resources to the point of utilizing good grounds very largely for any sort of nut tree plantations. In accordance with the canons of human nature men work hardest, and by preference, with crops which give them small returns for their labor. Riches from easily raised crops go chiefly to the lazy folks who don't like work. On the way to this meeting some of you perhaps noticed near Rye on the west side of the railroad track, a chicken farm on a side hill and a rich bottom land which had been ditched and set out to about three hundred willow trees along the ditch banks. Now if the owner of this property had set out English walnuts in the place of the willows, each tree at the present time, at a low estimate, might be bearing five dollars worth of nuts per year per tree, and I am, sure that would be a much larger income than the owner gets from his chickens—an income obtained certainly with much less trouble, because neighbors cannot break in at night and carry off walnut trees of such size. Two or three weeks from the present time you will observe people everywhere in this section of the country raking up leaves from various willows, poplars and maples, when they might quite as well be raking up bushels of nuts of various kinds instead of just leaves.
I presume that the extensive planting of pine trees for food purposes will have to wait until we have advanced to the point of putting other kinds of nut trees upon good ground first. Pines will be employed for the more barren hillsides when the folks of three hundred years from now begin to complain of the high cost of living.
Among some thirty or more species of pine trees which furnish important food supply for various peoples I exhibit nuts from only sixteen species today, because much of the crop comes from Europe and from Asia. I could not obtain a larger variety of specimens on account of the present interest of people in the game which military specialists play wherever industrious nations have saved up enough money to be turned over to their murder experts. In the pine trees we have opportunity for combining beauty and utility. As a group they are mountain lovers preferring localities where the air drainage is particularly good, but many of them will grow thriftily and will fruit well on low grounds. Fine nuts range in character from the rich, sugary, oily and highly nitrogenous nut of the Mexican piñon to the more starchy bunya bunya of Australia, as large as a small potato and not much better than a potato, unless it is roasted or boiled. Yet this latter pine is valuable for food purposes and the British Government has reserved one forest of the species thirty miles long and twelve miles wide in which no one is allowed to cut trees.
The nut of the Araucaria imbricata has constituted a basis for contention among Indian tribes in Chile for centuries, and perhaps more blood has been shed over the forests of this pine than over any other single source of food supply in the world. We do not know if the Pinus imbricata will fruit in the climate and at the latitude of New York, but I know that at least one tree of the species has lived for twenty years on the Palmer estate here in Stamford.
Some of the smaller pine nuts like those of the single-leaved pine, or of the sugar pine, are delicious when cracked and eaten out of hand, but the smaller pine nuts are pounded up by the Indians with a little water and the thick, rich, creamy emulsion like hickory milk when pressed out, is evaporated down to a point where the milk can be kept for a long time without decomposition. In addition to the nuts of the sugar pine, the Indians collect the sugar of dried juice which exudes at points where cuts have been made in the tree for the purpose. Incidentally, the sugar pine is one of our finest American trees anyway. Botanists tell us that it grows to a height of two hundred and seventy-five feet, and travellers say that it reaches three hundred feet. The latter people having actually seen the trees we may know which estimate to accept.
Aside from the beauty of most pines and the majesty of some of them, their utility is not confined to nuts alone. Timber and sap products are very valuable. The sugar pine in the latitude of New York is hardy, but does not grow as rapidly as it does in the West. The same may be said of the Jeffrey bull pine, but I shall show you some thriftier trees of this latter species tomorrow on my property. A very pretty striped nut is that of the Pinus pinea. This is the Italian pignolia, and you may buy them in the confectionery stores in this country. They are used as a dessert nut chiefly, but form an important food supply in some parts of Europe. The Swiss stone pine, Pinus cembra, is one of the hardy nut pines, fruitful in this vicinity, and the Pinus Armandi, the Korean pine and the Lace-bark pine from central China, are hardy and fruitful in this vicinity, to our knowledge.
Two very handsome pine nuts are those of the Digger pine, Pinus Sabiniana and the Big-cone pine, Pinus Coulteri. Both trees are hardy in this latitude, but I have not been able to locate any which are of bearing age as yet. The nuts have a rich dark brown or nearly black and tan shading. The nut of the Digger pine is very highly prized by the Indians and is larger and better in quality than the nut of the Big-cone pine which looks so much like it.
Nuts of the Torrey pine have been somewhat difficult to secure for planting, because they are esteemed so highly for food purposes that they have been collected rather closely by local people in the small area in which this species is found, on our Pacific Coast. It is improbable that the Torrey pine will be hardy much above our most southern states.
We do not advertise dealers in our association as a rule, but Mr. Thomas J. Lane, of Dresher, Pennsylvania, is not likely to make any great fortune from his sale of pine nuts to us. Consequently, I am stating at this point that Mr. Lane has offered to go to the trouble of securing pine nuts from different parts of the world for our members who wish to plant different species experimentally. I have given him a list of species to be kept permanently on file, and the list is marked in such a way that ones which are known to be hardy, semi-hardy, or fruitful in the latitude of New York may be selected for experimental planting. I hope that some of our southern planters will plant South American, Asiatic, African and Australian species of nut pines for purposes of observation. Mr. Lane will get the seed for them.