Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting.: Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association, Report Of The Proceedings At The Tenth Annual Meeting.: Battle Creek, Michigan, December 9 and 10, 1919
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
And now to my theme, "Should the Country Roadsides be Planted and Why."
The present high cost of living, and in fact the cost of living at any
time is a fruitful and serious problem. Our vast natural resources
during the century gone, of forests, of game, and of grazing lands, have
almost to the point of extinction been rapidly passing away, and it
behooves us, who have profited thereby and now owe a duty to our race to
artificially provide wherever and whenever we can for the future of
humankind. In what better way can this be done than in utilizing the
immense acreage of America's vast system of highways, (now absolutely
wasted except for the sole purpose of travel), to reproduce the very
finest of our country's magnificent trees, to again afford beauty,
grateful shade, valuable timber and the choicest of food in great
abundance for the generations to come.
Were this not a convention devoted to the advancement of nut growing
alone, I would be glad to extol also for road planting fruit trees of
every kind of adequate size and character, and free or nearly so, from
the ravages of disease or insect pest, would be glad to praise the
stately, hard maple, with its clear, sweet sap, producing the syrup and
sugar that are the delight of childhood and age, and would be glad to
recommend the useful basswood with its valuable lumber and its fragrant
yellow flowers, producing that nectar from which our most delicious
honey is made, and would be glad to recommend for our highways, certain
other majestic trees needed by man and beautiful in the landscape.
But the object of this association and convention is a specialized one,
as undoubtedly it should be, owing to the important field it covers, and
therefore the nut trees and it alone for planting on highways and in
public places should be the subject of this paper.
If we were to confine ourselves to one native variety or species for our
Northern territory, the great majority of people would unhesitatingly
say, let it be the Black Walnut (_Juglans nigra_). Attaining as it does
a height of 100 feet and more, and a trunk of four feet and over in
diameter, with a symmetrical top of splendid foliage, bearing the
richest of nuts and its timber the most valuable in the country, with a
natural range extending from Michigan to Mississippi and from Delaware
to the Dakotas, it should be universally planted throughout the United
States along thousands of miles of our great trunk line roads.
Its nearest American relative, the butternut (_Juglans cinerea_)
preferring lower lands along river bottoms, attaining an average height
of 60 feet with a trunk of 3 feet, its wood suitable for cabinet work,
its bark with medicinal properties, and its nuts of splendid flavor,
should be planted where soil conditions call for it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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