new
wood. The Busseron is just recovering from a severe cutting back by the
owner and should be in shape to give a good crop next year. Other pecans
in the vicinity bore a very light crop.

The Niblack bore only a few nuts this year. Butterick had a very good
crop for an off year, some five bushels as reported to me, and they were
well filled. This tree is very large, 4-1/2 feet in diameter, 90 foot
spread, located near Grayville, Ill.

The writer and my son, M. P. Reed, have top worked quite a number of
large black walnuts, ranging from 3 to 9 inches in diameter. They were
cut back last spring and budded in the new growth this summer, setting
from 20 to 40 buds in some of the trees. Buds of the Hall, Pomeroy and
Rush have taken well and look very promising. Of other varieties only a
limited number have taken. We will top work several large trees this
coming summer and should get results soon from these.

Pecans in the nursery have made a very satisfactory growth. The stand of
buds was only fair, in some cases poor. We still have a limited number
of Indiana and Busseron trees but the supply of other kinds is exhausted
for this year.

We have planted 600 pounds of pecans and 50 bushels of walnuts and with
the seedlings we have on hand in nursery hope to have plenty of stock to
work in the future.

We had a splendid stand of grafts of the Major pecan the past spring and
some of these made 4 feet of growth and calipered 3/4-inch, for grafts
set May 1st.

THE LATE HENRY HALES AS A NUT CULTURIST

H. W. HALES, NEW JERSEY

About 1876 he and the celebrated writer and agriculturist, Andrew S.
Puller, made extensive experiments with the large English
filbert,--mostly of the Kentish cob varieties. These proved unadapted to
the climate as the trees seemed to run all to growth and bore very few
nuts. About this time, also, very extensive plans were laid to propagate
by grafting the Hales Paper Shell Hickory. There is probably no more
difficult tree in existence to graft than the hickory as, owing to the
extreme hardness and close grain of the wood there is always an
uncertainty about their uniting permanently, consequently the percentage
of perfect trees was always small. Mr. Hales tried all kinds and methods
of grafting, some were done on stocks that stood naturally in the
fields, others were grafted in greenhouses, then again, others were
tried in frames or sashes, and large numbers were grown in pots, and
succe