The results are discouraging. Only one or two seedlings gave us six or 8 successful grafts on all the five varieties but by that method of trying all five of these varieties on all ten of the seedings we hope to get a start. We will try them again, and we hope to get at least a start that will work. It may be that we will have to start over again. We may want to take ten other seedlings. That is, in brief, our work so far in that direction.
We took it off the ground. We didn't have long enough side roots.
MEMBER: How about mound layering?
DR. McKAY: We tried cutting off at the ground level and mounding up those sprouts and tried to root them, with no satisfactory results. There was just a small amount of rooting.
MEMBER: Did you try layering?
DR. McKAY: One year we did, but with no success.
MR. McDANIEL: I have seen a few layered successfully but it's a little slow.
MR. O'ROURKE: Shall we move to vegetative propagation and consider cuttings first?
DR. McKAY: Just one thing I think ought to be mentioned at this time. We know that even the use of clonal rootstocks does not entirely eliminate variability. All the work that has been done with these Malling apple stocks shows that, as far as apples are concerned. Now we have an idea which, in a crop like chestnuts, may have very far reaching influence and we feel quite hopeful for it. That is growing seedling progenies of certain parent trees. I want to tell you our experience with it. We started our work on breeding and selection of tung nuts in 1938, and we have tested now over 600 parent trees that were especially selected. Out of those six hundred we have released a total of six horticultural varieties, for asexual propagation. But out of those six we have three trees, the seed of which will produce seedling progenies that come very true to the type of the parent tree. One of those released we know as the Lampton variety. It will produce from 95 to 100 per cent of its seedlings, that are so true to type that you can identify them in the nursery. At the end of the first season you plant 95 to 100 per cent of the remaining trees in the orchard and anybody can identify the trees.
In the case of budded trees we have the variability of the rootstocks, which affects the growth. Since that particular variety has been released there has not been one single nut of that variety crushed. Every single seed is grown to tree size, to plant in a new orchard. It has taken us 12 years to reach that stage, but that one variety is probably the most outstanding thing we have. There is a slight variation in the trees but not as much as you have in other trees.