In Michigan, hickory and black walnut trees have been used along the highways as avenue trees for a considerable period. In Pennsylvania occasionally the Persian walnut is used as an avenue tree. One of the beauty spots along the roadway of Lancaster County is this stretch of roadway under the spreading branches of Persian walnut trees. Senator McNary of Oregon thought so well of the beauty of the filbert that he induced his brother to plant several trees on his lawn in the city of Salem. It is no exageration to say that there are no prettier trees in the city then are these before you.
To a considerable extent, nut raising is being combined with the poultry industry in the Northwest. The poultry raisers claim that some kind of trees are essential to furnish shade in the poultry yards. They say that fruit trees are not desirable for the reason that at harvest time the chickens not only pick and ruin the fruit but themselves get internal disorders. Nut trees, they argue, fit in very well, as the chickens cannot hurt the nuts nor the nuts the chickens. Furthermore, the trees in chicken parks salvage a great deal from the chicken manure which would otherwise be lost. The use of nut trees in this way is a practice which it would seem could well be introduced to good advantage in the eastern states.
Among the ornamentals, it is difficult to imagine a species which could more effectively be used than the pecan. The picture before you was taken of a comparatively young tree perhaps 30 or 40 years old on the home grounds of a private citizen near Easton, Maryland at practically our own latitude. It is a most beautiful tree.
Rightly used, the black walnut is also one of our most effective species in the landscape. The picture before you is of a tree 51 years old. It stands in front of the home residence of a sister to United States Senator Charles L. McNary of Salem, Oregon. When photographed, this tree measured 10 feet, 6 inches in girth at breast height. It would be hard to imagine a more noble and graceful nut.
Along the roadways of California, we not uncommonly find the native black walnut used as an avenue tree. It is very refreshing and cooling on a hot day to drive under trees of the sort illustrated in the picture before you. This avenue of trees is along the Lincoln Highway less than a mile west of the University grounds at Davis.
The President: The next speaker on the program will be presented by Dr. Morris.
Dr. Morris: They say that a biographer unconsciously writes his autobiography. That is not tautology. Some one writing of the late Frank N. Mayer said: "The plant hunter and explorer is the unsung Columbus of horticulture." Our next speaker was the one who wrote that in Mr. Meyer's biography. We all recognize it as autobiography. Emerson tells us that every successful institution is the lengthened shadow of one man. There were heroes before Agamemnon and botanists before Dr. Fairchild, but with the beginning of the new century there came into existence the development of a new idea, that of exploration in foreign countries for the purpose of bringing to us their valuable plant products. It was one of those things which we may say makes the whole world kin because the economists tell us that basically the food supply is fundamental to all subsequent human activities. Dr. Fairchild organized the machinery of exploration for purposes of introduction into this country of valuable plants from foreign lands. There is perhaps at the present time no one who serves better as peace maker than does the one who gives the world more food. From the economist's standpoint the food supply subtends all advances in civilization. Now the hour is late and we all know what Dr. Fairchild has done. Any remarks on my part are made because they belongs to the form of polite procedure rather than because of need for telling of things which Dr. Fairchild has accomplished.
Dr. Fairchild: Ladies and Gentlemen of the Northern Nut Growers Association. When I face men and women who are doing things in agriculture I feel a peculiar degree of embarrassment. I do not know why but I suppose it is because what I have done, what little I have done in bringing in these new things, has never enabled me to get to the bottom of any of the things that I have brought in. In other words I feel that I am in the presence of a number of men who know down to the very smallest minutiae the business that they are engaged in. Now I do not know these minutiae about plants. I wish I did. There is nothing more fascinating in the world than to take one crop and learn to know it "down to the ground." It is coming to be one of the greatest things in the imagination of man, this grappling with the fundamental problems of agriculture which are wrapped up in the varieties of the plants that we grow. I have had a very severe education in that matter of varieties and I want to congratulate you as a body of men and women who are individually going to find out what these best varieties are.
I suppose that the talk that Mr. Reed and I had in a bamboo grove out in Chico., California, when we were trying to find out uses for the bamboo and Reed said: "Well, the pecan and almond growers want to knock the nuts off their trees with these bamboo poles," is what led up to this talk, and I want to thank Mr. Reed for the opportunity to show slides of a few of the new plants which we are working on in the Department of Agriculture.