DR. GRAVES: We have worked with this method of inarching blighted chestnuts so long and found it so successful that I felt it my duty to tell you people something about it. It's really a method of cure for the blight on Oriental chestnuts and their hybrids. I have not found it to work well on the American chestnut. Now, suppose we have our tree, with a blighted area on the trunk. I am assuming that the blight starts near the base of the tree as it usually does. When you see it, you cut it out with a sharp knife removing the bark to the wood. Blighted trees send up shoots from the base, below the blighted bark. So you take one of these shoots, sharpen it at the top and insert this sharpened tip under the healthy bark at the top of the blighted area. The shoot should be a little longer than the blighted area so that you can get a spring to the shoot as you push its tip in between the bark and the trunk. Even if it goes up above and breaks the bark a little bit, it doesn't matter. This inarched shoot renews the connection between the leaves and the roots across the blighted area. You know the leaves make the food of the tree, which goes down in the bark to the roots. The reason blight kills these trees is that it begins to girdle and sometimes does girdle the tree and destroys the connection between the leaves and the roots, so the roots eventually die. But by this method of inarching you restore that connection between leaves and roots. Now, you'd be surprised to see how well that's worked with us. We tried it first in 1937. We have been doing it now for 16 years. Every spring we take our trees that show the blight, our hybrids and Oriental chestnuts, and inarch, and the whole thing doesn't take more than a few minutes. Then after our shoot is inarched here, we tie it with old-fashioned string. The tips of the inarched grafts should be covered with grafting wax or paraffin. The scion will probably send out shoots which should be removed. And another thing, cut the string when you know the graft has taken above. If the blighted area is higher up in the tree, you can use bridge graft. This, you can see, is a kind of bridge grafting. But in bridge grafting, the scion must be anchored in the bark both above and below the lesion. As I say, we have cured our hybrids. There doesn't need to be anybody losing a Chinese chestnut tree ever, using this method. No sense in it. You can usually do this grafting in the spring about April when the leaves and the buds are beginning to show their green. Any questions? MR. DAVIDSON: You say you paint the wood? DR. GRAVES: Yes, with any ordinary paint. There is a tree wood paint, I know, that's better, but we use ordinary paint. Meeting adjourned at 4:50 o'clock, p.m. MONDAY EVENING SESSION "What's Your Problem?"--Round Table Discussion _Moderator_: J. W. McKay _Panel_: J. C. McDaniel, D. C. Snyder, Jesse D. Diller, Stephen Bernath