This gives you a good idea of the pistache fruit with its outer shell, the nut and the green interior. If any of you are going to California and do not like the idea of taking up hazel nuts, walnuts and pecans, if you will take up this industry we will help you all we can. It will grow in Arizona, New Mexico, and we have records of them growing in Arkansas. They will stand a temperature below zero. Trees have been known to live through several winters even in Southern Kansas.
In all these investigations we have found the stock problem is very important. Here we have the Pistachia atlantica which has much smaller seeds. It is this that we are using most commonly as a stock for the pistaches that are being grown in California. Frank N. Meyer brought back from China the seeds of the Chinese pistache, the hardiest of all pistaches, a tree which has been almost hardy even as far north as Washington and central Kansas. It is not only a nut tree but a magnificent ornamental tree and grows to a very large size. We have used it as an avenue tree leading to our plant introduction gardens in Chico because it colors up so beautifully in the autumn and the spring. In the spring the tips of these leaves and branches are a brilliant pink and in the autumn it turns a gorgeous scarlet. It is destined to be one of the best landscape trees of California in our opinion. It grows to be centuries old.
Frank Meyer standing beside a tree which has stood three centuries at least. Imagine what pleasure he would have had had he only lived to walk under this great avenue in his old age.
The question of congeniality between the true pistache and the Chinese pistache is shown here. We rather jumped to the conclusion, when we found that the ordinary pistache overgrew the Chinese pistache, that perhaps it was not so good a stock as we first thought, but I notice, looking back at my photograph taken in Greece in 1901, that the regular stocks used by the Greeks for the pistache are overgrown in the same way by the true pistache. We have much larger trees than these now in Chico and as the Chinese pistaches are very old and large trees we have come to the conclusion that in all probability the pistache will be successful on this Chinese stock.
I was walking through a market in Hong Kong in 1902 and I saw a few bushels of nuts that I had never heard of or seen before. The nuts looked like acorns but when I picked them up I found them as hard as hickory nuts. I cracked one of them with a brick and it was almost as hard to crack as a hickory nut. It was unmistakably an acorn, I thought, and I bought a bushel of the nuts and sent them to this country. It is called Pisania by botanists and it has many of the characteristics of an acorn. The kernel of this nut comes out whole and for that reason it would be very easily cracked by mechanical means. It has a sweetness which does not suggest an acorn. It does not remind you of the acorn. It is a commercial product in Southern China shipped down the West river and it seemed to me well worth while trying to grow it in the United States. We have had a great deal of trouble with it. We did not find the right place for it at first. It was hardy here in Washington, even, for a few seasons but the temperature at seventeen, eighteen and twenty below zero finally killed it out. It is now growing down in Mississippi.
Here is a photograph sent me from Honkong, the only one I have of the tree as it appears on the hills of Honkong. This tree which is now 11 feet tall on the place of Mr. Joe Williams at Langdon, Mississippi, is one of the few that is now growing in the United States. There is one in Southern California. It probably would be perfectly hardy along the Gulf coast. Just how good a bearer it is going to prove I do not know but it is very interesting even to register the fact that the plant is established in the Southern States.
The Macadamia ternifolia, or Queensland nut, is not quite so well known in Queensland as I thought it was. A very brilliant young man from Australia, by the name of Johnston, passed through my office the other day and I showed him the photograph of the Macadamia and to my chagrin he did not know much about it, although he was a very good botanist and a very keen man. He said "We do not pay much attention to these things over there." That is really characteristic of many of the foreign plants that we have brought in. They are not developed in their own countries any more than some of the fruits which we have in this country are not developed by us. Mr. Littlepage and I are going out in a day or two to see if we can find some larger papaws. Now the papaw has been just as badly neglected by the Americans as the Macadamia by the Australians and it may be that the only way to get the papaw developed is to send it to some other country and get them to develop it. We do not always develop our own possibilities.
This is a tree grown in Avon Park, Florida. It interests me very much because it looks as if it would be a good bearer, is suited to the sandy lands of southern and central Florida, seems to be quite hardy and is a beautiful nut. It will vie with any other edible nut that I know of. This tree is in the Royal Palm Gardens in Palm Beach. The trees were brought in by us about 1905 or 1906.
This is a tree in Cuba where it is perfectly at home.
This gives you an idea of the character of the nut in a bunch. This is the nut. The shells when opened are as attractive as anything I know of. This is a very thick walled variety. We have much thinner walled forms that have come from Hawaii where it is now being grown. The dark part is a maroon brown and the lighter part is a brilliant creamy yellow. Altogether it is an extremely attractive nut, an excellent eating nut and has very good food qualities. We have had them analyzed, and all the data are at the disposal of you gentlemen at any time you wish to consult our files.