Although Rev. Crath had written me that the shipment had been sent on a certain Polish steamer, I learned of its arrival only from a letter I received from the importing company, which requested that the original bill of lading and invoice be sent to them at once, as the shipment had already been in the harbor for a week but could not be released by the customs office until they had these documents.  I had received the bill of lading from Rev. Crath but not the invoice, for he had not known that I would need it.  So my valuable, but perishable, shipment remained in port storage day after day while I frantically sought for some way to break through the “red tape” holding it there.  Cables to Rev. Crath were undeliverable as he was back in the mountains seeking more material.  In desperation, I wrote to Clarence A. Reed, an old friend, member of the Northern Nut Growers’ Association and in charge of government nut investigations in the Division of Pomology at Washington.  Through his efforts and under heavy bond pending receipt of the invoice, the walnut and filbert material was released and sent to Washington, D. C. As there was too much of it to be inspected through the usual facilities for this work, it was necessary to employ a firm of seed and plant importers to do the necessary inspecting and fumigating.  At last, terminating my concern and distress over the condition in which the trees and scions would be after such great delays and so many repackings, the shipment arrived in St. Paul.  There remained only the requirement of getting permission from the Bureau of Plant Inspection of the State of Minnesota to take it to Wisconsin, where, if there was anything left, I intended to plant it.  This permission being readily granted, we managed, by truck and, finally, by sled, to get it to the nursery about the middle of the winter.

The following spring, we planted the nuts and trees and grafted the scions on black walnut and butternut stocks.  The mortality of these grafts was the greatest I have ever known.  Of about four thousand English walnut grafts, representing some twenty varieties, only one hundred twenty-five took well enough to produce a good union with the stock and to grow.  Some of them grew too fast and in spite of my precautions, were blown out; others died from winter injury the first year.  By the following spring, there were only ten varieties which had withstood the rigor of the climate.  Of the five hundred trees, only a few dozen survived.  Fortunately, this was not one of our severe, “test” winters, or probably none of these plants would have withstood it.

The walnuts which were planted showed a fairly high degree of hardiness.  Of 12,000 seedling trees, our nursery is testing more than 800 for varietal classification.  These have been set out in test orchard formation on two locations, both high on the slope of a ravine, one group on the north side, one on the south.  It has been suggested that from the remaining seedlings, which number thousands, we select 500 to 1000 representative specimens and propagate them on black walnut stocks in some warmer climate, either in Oregon, Missouri or New York.  This would determine their value as semi-hardy trees worthy of propagation in such localities.  Such an experiment will probably be made eventually.