It was in 1933 that my aunt, Margaret Weschcke, told me of an apricot tree growing in a yard on the Mississippi River bluff in St. Paul and said to be bearing fruit.  I was quite skeptical until I saw the tree and also saw fruit from it which had been preserved by the woman who owned it.  Convinced of the hardiness of the tree, I was anxious to obtain scionwood but it was not until late that winter that I received permission to do so.  It happened that a truck had broken off a large branch from the tree while delivering coal, and the owner very reasonably decided that taking a few twigs from it would not hurt it any more.  I not only took the small branches that she was willing to sacrifice from her tree but also as many as possible from the branch which had been torn off, as its terminals were still in a fresh condition.

I grafted these scions on hybrid plum trees where they took hold readily, and in 1938, they began to bear prolifically.  The apricots, which I have named Harriet, in honor of my mother, are a fine-flavored fruit, medium in size.  Their cheeks are a mottled red with raised surfaces.  Their pits are well-formed and fairly edible.  Although the parent tree died the winter I took scions from it, my grafts have proved quite hardy, having received no injury when temperatures as low as 47 deg. below zero have occurred.  Since the parent tree died because its roots were severely frozen, it would seem that the top of the tree, in this case, was more hardy than the root system.  This does occur sometimes, although it is unusual.

In developing the factor of hardiness further in this apricot variety, I have taken advantage of something I had observed about other fruit trees.  When one combines parts of two trees by grafting, it is a simple thing to select a hardy root stock from the available plants, just as I selected hardy plum stock on which to graft my apricot scions.  This is not always possible in choosing scionwood, however, since scionwood is usually selected for such reasons as the quality of its fruit.  It may happen that the top part of a tree is limited in its climatic scope because of its inability to withstand precipitate or otherwise unfavorable temperatures.  Having observed that certain grafted varieties of fruit trees, such as the Wealthy apple, for instance, have gradually come to be planted much farther north than they originally were, I reasoned that this was because only the hardiest of them survived and these hardy ones therefore became the mother blocks for future grafting.  This was an inescapable procedure which acted as a method of bud selection.  I therefore assumed that by a careful choice of the hardiest among surviving twigs of the most recent graft of the Harriet apricot, when particularly severe winter weather had caused some injury, I could induce extra-hardiness in future grafts.