One of the first pieces of foreign work I was asked to do for the government was to get and import the hard-shelled almonds of Spain. Most of you have eaten the Jordan almond and I imagine most of you think it comes from California, but there are very few Jordans grown in California and, so far as the investigations go which I have been able to make in California in co-operation with the candy manufacturers, I have discovered that the California growers are not growing the best almond in the world. That the IXL and the Nonpareil and other almonds are not considered sufficiently good for such men as Lowney to use in the manufacture of their almond candies was a surprise to me. And the reason? In the first place the skin of the kernel itself is too thick, the nut is too brittle and it has not the flavor of the imported nut. I was shocked the other day to read from cover to cover a bulletin on the subject of Almonds, and to find that not one word was said of flavor. It had to be a good cracker; but the marketable qualities did not take into consideration the question of the flavor of the kernel, its hardness or the thickness of skin.
This picture on the screen was taken in southeastern Spain. These are the almond crackers of Spain and a poorer lot of people I have never visited in my life. The little children, not over four years old, instead of playing as ours play, carry around with them in their hands little bundles of wheat straw which they braid with their hands as they play, making sombreros which are shipped to the Argentine. It is a very poor country where these grow. The soil Is very thin and very dry and these almond trees grow on the hillsides. It was with an unpleasant feeling that I took these cuttings from southeastern Spain, and brought them to America. I got them from the trees that were bearing these almonds, they were budded in California and we know where the trees are growing in California from these buds.
This is a view in one of these hillside plantations of southeastern Spain with two of the almond growers.
This is a view in the plains region near Valencia showing both the hard shelled almonds and the soft shelled ones. The soft shelled are those which are easily cracked with the fingers while the hard shelled have to be broken with a hammer or an instrument. It is these hard shelled almonds that we have been interested in getting.
I have not kept in touch with this almond situation as I would have if I had been a specialist on almonds instead of spreading my energies out over the whole field and it is time someone really got into the almond business. I once traveled fifty miles from Bobadilla, Spain to the next railway station between solid walls of seedling almonds in bloom. No American has ever been to these seedling orchards to see what they are. It should be possible to find in those rows that are now 25 years old late flowering varieties which would be adapted to the conditions in California or early flowering varieties which would cross pollinate the Jordan almond. But we have not had the extra man with which to do this and carry out the other things we have been obliged to do. The interesting thing about this Jordan almond is that it behaves differently in our country than it does over in Spain. You notice how smooth each one of these almonds is. There is no sharp keel on the Spanish grown Jordan almond at all. It is smooth all around. Here are the almonds grown in California from the scions which I brought in. You see how these "keels" are developed and the nut has also become more pointed. We have not had an opportunity to investigate this thing thoroughly, but I am convinced that this is an environmental effect. Dr. W. A. Taylor has suggested that the fact that the Jordan flowers before any other variety comes out may mean that the California nuts are the result of self fertilization and this self fertilization may be the cause of their different shape and texture. Either that or the bud wood which I brought over from Spain was not representative of the Jordan variety although I picked it from trees that were bearing these nuts and I saw the nuts and they were typical. Of course it is possible that on the bud stocks which I brought over there was this hereditary tendency to produce these keels. However, we have made importations of the Jordan almond since then with the same result. One of these was grown in California in the desert region and one in Niles where John Rock, the great pioneer horticulturist of California, had his orchards. Both of them behaved in the same way. I sent some of the best kernels from these imported Jordan almonds to Mr. Lowney, the candy manufacturer who imports large quantities of Jordan almonds from Spain, and he reported that he could not use them for his candy manufacture because they were too hard and the skin too tough.
One of the most interesting experiences of my life was in 1903 when I visited a French barber in a little town called Nevada City, California, in the foothills of the Sierras. He had come over to this country without a penny and had set up a barber shop in this little mining village of Nevada City. He had saved from his fees for cutting people's hair and shaving them, $3,000. He had bought a piece of barren hillside which everybody laughed at him for buying; and he sent an order for $2,500 worth of nut trees and fruit trees to a nursery firm in his old home in France. He did this without even having an irrigating system with which to irrigate those plants when they arrived. He told me with tears in his eyes how he had worked night and day, carrying buckets of water to save this collection of plants when it arrived from France. When I visited Felix Gillett in his plantation there, which he called the Barren Hill Nursery, I felt that I had never seen a more delightful spot in my life. It was a kind of a paradise which he had built up by his love for plants and his wonderful knowledge of the varieties which he handled. He certainly was one of the great experts of this country in the nut and fruit industry, particularly the nut industry. It is his collection of hazelnuts which Mr. Reed spoke of as having found its way into Mr. Quarnburg's hands. In fact I was at Mr. Quarnburg's place a year ago last summer and learned that he got his first start from this little French barber in the mountains of Nevada.
This is Felix Gillett standing beside the first Jordan almond tree in America. The difficulty with the Jordan tree in this section was that it flowered too early and too few crops were produced. We have tried a good many sections for the almond and one of the problems, in my opinion, is the development of stocks for it. Here is the IXL on one of Meyer's Chinese stocks (Amygdalus davidiana). It does very well on this stock in the region of San Antonio, Texas. But the future of this almond business ought to have been told you by Meyer after he came back from his trip in Western China. These bushes are of the Tangutian almond, a little bush almond; growing occasionally 15 or 18 or 20 feet in height and hardy. It was Meyer's plan, had he lived, to find some place in Southwest Colorado in which to breed hardy almonds that would cover those hillsides with a food producing plant. I believe had he lived he would have done that for we have gotten together already for the breeders a number of forms of great promise. Mr. Wight of the Office of Pomological Investigations is now in California doing breeding work, and I hope his life will be spared so that he can produce a practical bush almond. My object in throwing this photograph on the screen is to show you a hillside covered with a food producing plant which has never yet received the attention of human beings, and yet if studied might lead to the production of an entirely new type of almond which will probably grow as far north as the Dakotas.
Jumping from the Dakotas to Florida I want to introduce to you the Candle Nut or Kukui nut of the Hawaiian Islands which is growing in the sandy regions of the tropical belt of Florida. If you will read the literature you will find that it is referred to as a cathartic, resembling in this respect the castor bean. The problem is whether the candle nut as grown in Florida is poisonous or not. Prof. Simpson is growing in his yard in Florida a tree of this Kukui nut and has eaten these nuts for years, and he just sent me a couple quarts of them from his tree and I have tried them on my friends with no injurious results whatever. The thing to look out for is this fetish, this superstition of poison. This is a very hard-shelled nut, very oily and resembles somewhat the Brazil nut. If a market can be made for it, and there does not seem to be any reason why there cannot, there is no reason that they cannot be grown and they will be grown in southern Florida. That country which in 1898 was a wilderness is now developing very rapidly as a region of homes and what they want is plants that they can grow down there that they can live upon.
On the left is one of these trees which has a good many nuts on it. It is in Miami, Florida. This is a branch of one of these Kukui nuts in Miami.
This is probably the least known of any of the nuts. It is the Yeheb nut. It belongs to the order of Leguminosae and they tell us it is so sweet, having between 21 and 22 per cent of sugar, that the native Arab will desert his dates and rich diet, which is the ordinary diet of that region, and take to the Yeheb whenever it comes into fruit. This Yeheb shrub grows in the deserts of Italian Somaliland and ought to succeed in our southwestern country. During the war there was attached to the Italian Embassy the Italian Explorer Captain Vanutelli, who had the distinction of having been captured by a savage chief in Abyssinia and bound for over two months to a black Abyssinian slave. When I spoke to him about this Yeheb nut he said, "Yes, I have eaten it. It is a wonderful nut. Some day I will get you some of it." When the shipment came there were two tons of nuts and I was a little surprised to say the least. They were brought on camel back over the deserts. During the war they took eight or nine months to get to Washington and when they arrived they were all dead. Notwithstanding many attempts this nut is not grown in the United States but we will have it. It is very thin-shelled, the kernels come out whole and have a very sweet, delicate flavor.