The wooded hills and river bottoms contain several kind of hickories. I have several pecan trees grafted to the Pleas and McCallister hybrids, but they are light producers in Oklahoma. I have 80 acres of river bottom hickory nuts in southwest Missouri that bear abundantly.
Oriental Persimmons
Persimmons grow native here. The Early Golden, an American variety, is very productive and ripens in September long before frost. Of the Orientals I have Tamopan, Eureka, Fuyu, Data Maru, Tanenashi. Most all bear heavily, in fact usually overbear. They stand our dry weather better than does the native persimmon. The very large fruit usually in colors of yellow and red attract much attention from visitors who think they are oranges. The persimmon belongs to the ebony family. The fruit contains as high as 40% sugar and in the Orient is a national dish. We propagate them by grafting our native stock.
Pawpaw
The Pawpaw is native in Missouri and Arkansas and in the eastern part of Oklahoma. It is a beautiful tree and very productive. We shade the small trees here until they get started, after which they do quite well. The fruit is a favorite with many.
Chestnuts
I think the greatest tragedy that ever befell American horticulture was the chestnut blight. Not so long ago every hill and mountain-side east of the Mississippi River, from near the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border was covered with native chestnut trees producing millions of pounds of food for man and beast. Today all has been devastated by this terrible blight and nothing remains save leafless trunks, like tombstones, in memory of a grand food tree.
In 1889, Tom and Mary Jones left their Kentucky mountain home to establish a new one in Oklahoma. As with all pioneers they brought seeds of many species with them, including chestnuts. I now own the farm they homesteaded. On it today there is an American chestnut tree 4 feet in diameter with a limb-spread of 50 feet. This grand tree has been an inspiration to me, surviving our hot dry summers and outliving two generations of fruit trees by its side. This beautiful tree, now nearly 60 years of age, was proof-sufficient that chestnuts would grow in Oklahoma. I began to plant chestnuts. I planted all the Riehl varieties—Progress, Dan Patch, Van Fleet and others. I also had Boone, an American and Japanese hybrid, brought about by Endicott, also of Illinois. These have borne well. Being isolated and outside of the native chestnut range, they have not blighted.
Since 1906, the Government has imported many thousand seed chestnuts from China. Later, it distributed little trees among the nut growers in an effort to re-establish chestnut growing in this country. This Chinese chestnut is blight-resistant. The best Chinese seedlings have been selected for propagation and have been named; of these I have Stoke (a hybrid), Hobson, Carr and several others. They are very prolific and often set burs the same year set out. Mr. Stoke sent me scions of the newer varieties this spring—Colby's hybrid, and Stoke seedling's Nos. 1 and 2. I grafted these on Chinese stocks; they set burs and matured nuts the same year grafted. The named varieties of Chinese Chestnut are the most precocious bearers of all the nut trees, are adapted and worthy of planting over a wide area. It should be the duty of every man who is interested in food trees to lend a hand to help re-establish chestnut growing in this country, now that we have blight-resistant varieties.
Almost within the shadow of our State Capitol, on a main highway leading from our fair city, I have planted 2-1/2 acres of blight-resistant Chinese chestnut trees, as a living memorial to our only child, Harold, who gave his life to our country in a Jap prison camp in the Philippines. We shall devote the rest of our days to this Living Memorial, and leave means for its continuance, so that passers-by in generations to come may be reminded of the world's greatest tree tragedy, and to demonstrate that chestnuts which once grew native over half the nation, and were laid low by a terrible disease, may again be grown.