rough California.
I went to see Leonard Coats, one of those real pioneers of 65 or 70
years of age, who has perhaps done as much for California horticulture
as any other one nurseryman, and he took me up into his orchard on the
hill side overlooking his nursery where no drops of rain had fallen
between the months of March and October when I was there and where they
only have 22 inches of rainfall anyway, and I found growing there this
collection of pistache trees which we had sent him about ten years ago.
The nuts are borne towards the ends of the branches. The tree is able to
withstand any amount of drought and as I sat there and he told me how
prohibition had wiped out the vineyards of the surrounding country, how
the Italians had deserted them and gone back to Italy, I could not help
feeling that in this beginning on his hillsides we had the possibility
of covering those thousands of acres of hillsides which exist in
California today, from which the grape vines have been taken out, with a
nut crop of the very first importance. These little beginnings are
really the most interesting things in life. I read in the paper today
that this is the ninety-fourth anniversary of the first railroad in
America and my mind went back to a conversation I had with Edward
Everett Hale when he told me that his father was the first man to bring
over an English locomotive to America. What do you suppose was the
principal objection that the people had to railway exploitation in this
country? They could not see how two trains could pass each other on the
same track. So his father brought over from England a little model
switch and put it down in his parlor and took people in there and showed
them that two trains could pass if one ran off on a siding. That story
of Edward Everett Hale has helped me to understand why it is that most
people hesitate to go ahead into any new industry always seeing some
impossibility in its development. I could probably prove to you beyond a
shadow of a doubt that not a single one of these nut trees I am showing
you tonight could ever be made a success. Notwithstanding that they are
successful.

This is one of the Sfax varieties from Tunis growing in our plant
introduction gardens at Chico. We had to establish gardens where we
could grow these trees and send out the young plants to growers and in
these gardens we have test nurseries or test orchards as we call them
where we grow these fruits. This is an Assyria