ar for Mt. Vernon, Ind. From there we went in a Ford touring car
without any top and only one rear fender and drove over nine miles of
the worst roads I ever motored over to the Wabash river where we hired a
motor driven mussel boat to take us four miles down the river. The
remaining three miles we made on foot, reaching this grove about ten a.
m., and searched until late in the afternoon without locating the tree.
This day and trip I am sure Mr. C. A. Reed well remembers.
Two years later when roads and weather were more favorable, Mr. Luckado
and myself left Rockport one morning at four a. m. and drove all the way
to the grove, arriving there early in the morning and searching until
late in the afternoon and again without results. But when one takes into
consideration that this tree is standing somewhere near the center of an
unbroken forest of hundreds of acres in which it has been estimated
there are near 20,000 bearing-size pecan trees, it is some task to
locate a certain tree, though the search for this tree will be made
again.
It is very often that two or more trips are necessary to locate a tree
and about nine times out of ten when the tree is found it is not
considered worthy of propagation. Many amusing incidents and not a few
hardships are remembered in these past experiences. During the past
three years I have made four trips into southwestern Missouri and
southeast Kansas where there are thousands of native pecan trees
growing. Some trees in this section have been brought to notice which
seem promising. I now have several promising new varieties under test
and observation.
The search for new and better varieties must be kept up, for no doubt
there are yet unknown as good and possibly better trees than we have yet
located.
* * * * *
DR. ZIMMERMAN: Have you ever known anything about the Marmaton,
owned by J. E. Tipke at Rockwell, Missouri?
MR. WILKINSON: I have a sample of it.
DR. ZIMMERMAN: Mr. Tipke sent that to me. He told me it wasn't
as good as others but he said it never missed a crop.
THE PRESIDENT: For the benefit of those who have not been down
to Mr. Wilkinson's I would like to say you will find it very worth while
to go there. In 1925 Mr. Wilkinson invited me to go with him through
southern Indiana, to see some of the large pecan trees he had there.
When I got there I really had to take two looks to see the top of some
of those trees. I found one tree
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