We brought in so many of them, (47,000 different kinds) in these 22 years that the office of Plant Introduction has been in operation that Mr. Reed suggested that the nut growers would like to have thrown on the screen pictures of the nuts of foreign countries. I said that we did not have any. Then I began to dig into our own literature, project reports, experimenters cards, correspondence and the other recording machinery that we have and I found that we had a good many. I want to make it perfectly plain to you that what I am going to do tonight is simply to open a door and show you the possibilities of some of these foreign nuts. There are a great many more that we have not succeeded in landing on the shores of America, and if any one of you will come to my office on 13th and F streets I will throw all the correspondence and photographs on the table and let you look through it.
It has been said that the Department's work is badly organized. Yes, it is badly organized. But I do not know how you are going to very well organize with a small body of men a group of projects every one of which is a life job for a man, especially when you cannot get the men, and when you do get them they do not stay on the job for life. So there is the great difficulty. Mr. Littlepage has hit the nail on the head. The Department of Agriculture is not well organized but it is not an easy thing to organize experimental work on at least 150 different kinds of industries with the money and the men we have. The fact that the investigations require the men to be on the land close to their work and that we are all in city buildings, is a great handicap. We have scarcely a tree or shrub or plant of any kind that bears on our work within two or three miles of the Department of Agriculture building. We need the land. We need a great many more men, and we need more money.
I landed in Greece in 1901. In Athens I saw them selling on the streets these pistache nuts which I opened with my fingers. The kernels are a brilliant green. I had never seem them before. I had heard of them. They were sold around the streets by the Greek peddlers and called pistachios. The pistache or pistachio industry is one which I wish some young, energetic man of seventy would take up. I say 70 because it requires a young man of seventy to take up one of these nut industries, the boys of 26 are too old. Some young fellow of seventy should go into the pistache industry and find out what there is in it and develop it into a great industry. The American Consul in Palestine told me six or eight years ago that there was no plant culture in all Palestine that paid so well as a pistache orchard. Trees have been known to yield as much as 40 to 50 dollars apiece. The Grecian pistaches are different from those of Tunis and Algeria and others of the Mediterranean countries. There are a good many different varieties.
This picture shows a piece of praline made of pistaches. This is sold on the streets of Athens and compares very favorably with our pralines made in New Orleans from the kernel of the pecan.
Mr. Chisholm, who was connected with the Consulate in Athens and who spoke Greek very well, took me out and showed me what these pistache trees looked like and when I found this miscellaneous lot of grafted pistache trees I made an arrangement to purchase the whole collection and send it to this country. I had great difficulty in getting the American Consul in Piraeus to help me ship them. I could not wait indefinitely and it took a good while to have them dug and packed. I asked him if he would send them and he said he was very busy. I told him this was a matter which concerned the people of the United States and if he did not have time to do it I would telegraph to the Secretary of Agriculture and tell him that the Consul in Athens was too busy to ship these plants. Finally he consented to ship them and this was the first shipment of grafted pistache trees to arrive in America. They were badly grafted, badly packed and badly prepared and I think only one of this whole collection survived and is now growing in the Gallespie grounds at Montecito, California.
Mr. Kearney ought to be here tonight and Mr. Swingle and Dr. Rixford. These three men have given more attention to the pistache than I have. Mr. Kearney was studying the date palm industry of Southern Tunis and in connection with it he made a study of the pistache industry of the desert region of the coast of Tunis. This picture represents an Arab standing beside an old pistache tree that probably is forty or fifty years of age. It represents the pistache in its winter dress. They are deciduous trees. They plant one male tree to about twenty females. We have had a great real of difficulty in propagating these pistache trees. We have five different species of stock on which to grow them, and we ought to learn all the best varieties in the world. But unfortunately some of the best varieties in Sicily are infested with a moth which lays its eggs in the twigs just below the leaf scar and it is impossible for the entomologist to detect these eggs without destroying the buds. That apparently trivial circumstance has made it impossible for us to get these cuttings in from Sicily without sending a trained horticulturist there for them. We never have had the money to send a man there who could do it, a man who had had the necessary experience. As a consequence we have not as big a collection of these pistache varieties as we ought to have.
These men in the photograph are getting the scions for Mr. Kearney, and I am glad to say that these particular scions which they cut are now growing in California. Mr. Kearney also on this same trip visited the Duke de Bronte estate on the slopes of Mount Etna. It was an estate bequeathed by the King of Italy to Lord Nelson, who was made the Duke de Bronte and it is still the property of the Nelson family. Mr. Beck, who was the manager for this estate and with whom we have had correspondence for nearly 18 years, gave us perhaps more information than we have gotten from any other foreign source on the cultivation of the pistache. The Trabonella, which was one of the best commercial varieties, came from the Bronte estate on the slopes of Mount Etna, where pistache growing is a paying industry. In Europe the nuts are very largely used, outside of the Mediterranean region for making the pistache ice cream because of the green color in the seed itself, and in the Mediterranean region both the yellow and green varieties as we are coming to use them in this country, as table nuts. The highest price is paid for the green pistache nuts which are used in ice creams and confectioneries. Here are two Sicilian horticulturists, one of them holding a bundle of bud sticks. This Trabonella variety is now growing in America. We have collected pistache nuts from many parts of the world. A very interesting man by the name of Jewett who became acquainted with the late Ameer of Afghanistan procured for us the Afghanistan pistache. I got in correspondence with him through the Consul in Calcutta. Through a mistake made in sending some of this correspondence direct instead of to Calcutta it nearly cost him his life. I did not know the conditions there and asked Jewett in my letter what the possibilities were of sending an Agricultural explorer there. The letter fell into the hands of the Ameer and aroused his suspicions. Jewett was one of the two English speaking persons at that time in the country. One Sunday morning my door bell rang, and Jewett came to my house in Connecticut Avenue with two big saddle bags filled with seed sent by the Ameer. This collection of pistache seeds with its Afghanistan label composed part of the collection of seeds. Very few of the seeds grew however and the seedlings, which like many nut trees do not come true to seed, have not produced any varieties of particular value.
A year ago I had the pleasure of making a motor tour through California. I went to see Leonard Coats, one of those real pioneers of 65 or 70 years of age, who has perhaps done as much for California horticulture as any other one nurseryman, and he took me up into his orchard on the hill side overlooking his nursery where no drops of rain had fallen between the months of March and October when I was there and where they only have 22 inches of rainfall anyway, and I found growing there this collection of pistache trees which we had sent him about ten years ago. The nuts are borne towards the ends of the branches. The tree is able to withstand any amount of drought and as I sat there and he told me how prohibition had wiped out the vineyards of the surrounding country, how the Italians had deserted them and gone back to Italy, I could not help feeling that in this beginning on his hillsides we had the possibility of covering those thousands of acres of hillsides which exist in California today, from which the grape vines have been taken out, with a nut crop of the very first importance. These little beginnings are really the most interesting things in life. I read in the paper today that this is the ninety-fourth anniversary of the first railroad in America and my mind went back to a conversation I had with Edward Everett Hale when he told me that his father was the first man to bring over an English locomotive to America. What do you suppose was the principal objection that the people had to railway exploitation in this country? They could not see how two trains could pass each other on the same track. So his father brought over from England a little model switch and put it down in his parlor and took people in there and showed them that two trains could pass if one ran off on a siding. That story of Edward Everett Hale has helped me to understand why it is that most people hesitate to go ahead into any new industry always seeing some impossibility in its development. I could probably prove to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that not a single one of these nut trees I am showing you tonight could ever be made a success. Notwithstanding that they are successful.
This is one of the Sfax varieties from Tunis growing in our plant introduction gardens at Chico. We had to establish gardens where we could grow these trees and send out the young plants to growers and in these gardens we have test nurseries or test orchards as we call them where we grow these fruits. This is an Assyrian variety brought in by old Dr. Fuller who spent some time as a missionary in Asia Minor and became convinced of the importance of the pistache industry, and has been one of the pioneers in these small beginnings. This is a six years old tree. This is 15 years old a seedling tree near Fresno. It has borne a good many crops of fair sized pistache nuts as large as the Trabonella, the Sfax, the Tunis and the Alleppo and those forms which are going to be the real pistaches of the future in this country. The pistache in fruit is a most interesting sight. The nuts are pinkish. They have the pinkness of the peach, almost, without the fuz and they are covered with a thin skin which is taken off usually with the fingers. The nut inside has a texture that makes it very attractive. When they are first gathered it is very difficult to crack them with the fingers but if they are put in the oven and roasted they open up and leave a little suture into which you put your thumb nails and pry the ends open.
This picture gives you some idea of the yield of the pistache. It is a fair yielder, as much as fifty pounds of nuts having been borne by eight or nine year old trees. Ours have not done as well as that. The price of course ranges like the price of all other nuts. They sold last year for 75 cents a pound here in Washington. The kernels sell for $1.50.