I turned the back yard of my home in St. Paul into an experimental plot.  Here I set out some of each kind of tree I planted or grafted at my farm in Wisconsin.  I had purchased a farm 35 miles east of St. Paul, beyond the influence of the St. Croix River Valley.  My experiments really began there.  The farm was covered with butternut trees, hazel bushes, and a wild hickory called “bitternut.”  This last is well-named for I have never found an animal other than a squirrel that could endure its nuts.  Possibly the white-footed mouse or deer-mouse could—­I don’t know.  He usually eats anything a squirrel does.  I learned to appreciate these bitternut trees later and they became a source of experience and interest to me as I learned to graft on them many varieties, species and hybrids of hickory.  They served as a root-system and shortened the length of time required to test dozens of hickory types, helping me in that way, to learn within one lifetime what types of nuts are practical for growing in the north.

Remembering the nut trees in southern Minnesota, I first thought to procure black walnut and hickory trees from some farmer in that district.  Through acquaintances in St. Peter, I did locate some black walnut trees only to find that it was impractical to dig and transport trees of the size I wanted.  A nursery near St. Paul supplied me with some and I bought twenty-eight large, seedling black walnut trees.  I was too eager to get ahead with my plans and I attempted, the first year these trees were planted, to graft all of them.  My ability to do this was not equal to my ambition though, and all but two of the trees were killed.  I was successful in grafting one of them to a Stabler black walnut; the other tree persisted so in throwing out its natural sprouts that I decided it should be allowed to continue doing so.  That native seedling tree which I could not graft now furnishes me with bushels of walnuts each year which are planted for understocks.  This is the name given to the root systems on which good varieties are grafted.

In an effort to replace these lost trees, I inquired at the University of Minnesota Farm and was given the addresses of several nurserymen who were then selling grafted nut trees.  Their catalogues were so inviting that I decided it would be quite plausible to grow pecans and English walnuts at this latitude.  So I neglected my native trees that year for the sake of more exotic ones.  One year sufficed; the death of my whole planting of English walnuts and pecans turned me back to my original interest.  My next order of trees included grafted black walnuts of four accepted varieties to be planted in orchard form—­the Stabler, Thomas, Ohio and Ten Eyck.