. If
it had had the figure, it would have been very valuable. The farmer
said, "I don't want you cutting on that tree because if it doesn't have
the figure and you don't buy it, the tree will be spoiled." Don't let
the buyers chop into the tree to see whether it has figure.

MR. CRAIG: I bought two to get grafting wood.

[Editor's note: Mr. Craig refers to the Lamb curly black walnut, article
on which appeared in NNGA 39th Annual Report.]

MR. WALTERS: There has been some work done on grafting or stimulating
growth for figure. One method was to beat the trees with a rubber hose
and try to stimulate figured or curly grain. Not too much has been
published on this work as yet.

MEMBER: Do you think the figure could be propagated by asexual
propagation?

MR. WALTERS: I don't know. I will say this; in forest trees, the
inherited characteristics are the things we depend upon. If a tree has
curly figure and the seed carries that characteristic, you may see it in
the progeny. An acquired characteristic I don't think you can depend on
so much.

MEMBER: Is it thought to be acquired or hereditary?

MR. WALTERS: I just don't know whether it is acquired or hereditary.

DR. ROHRBACHER: One thought came to me on this black walnut timber. It's
a long pull, and it is one for our posterity. The thought came to be
that it is for those of us who are interested in setting up something
for our offspring. The plan has been brought out before of using a
grafted known name variety of nuts. Plant those, and perhaps those trees
as they grow would first give us that wonderful nut which we were
looking for.

Symposium on Nut Tree Propagation

F. L. O'ROURKE, _Leader_

MR. O'ROURKE: I believe if you get 10 nut people together, you are going
to have eight or nine propagators. It is the one thing that people like
to dream and talk about.

I went through the list a little bit, and in order to save some time I
wrote a resume of what had been done. In order to accumulate that
material I had to dig into some of the more or less unused volume. There
is a wealth of information in some of those earlier reports of the
Northern Nut Growers Association.

MEMBER: You can get them for $15 a set.

MR. O'ROURKE: It's a good investment anyway. At any rate, I think I am
going to try to make a bit of an analogy. Suppose this was a church
group who had been working on paying off their mortgage. Every once in a
while they passed a hat, but ins