Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting: Guelph, Ontario, September 3, 4, 5, 1947
Science
Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Thirty-Eighth Annual Meeting: Guelph, Ontario, September 3, 4, 5, 1947
Northern Nut Growers Association -- Periodicals; Nut trees -- Periodicals; Nuts -- Periodicals
As tree indicators of the kind of site required for the establishment of
a chestnut forest Dr. Diller has chosen yellow poplar, northern red oak,
white ash, sugar maple, and yellow birch, with spice bush as a shrub
indicator and maiden hair fern, bloodroot and other herbs as herbaceous
indicators. Using a small area of about one eighth of an acre, Dr.
Diller's plan is to girdle all the trees and then underplant with
chestnut seedlings. He says: "As the girdled overstory trees die they
gradually yield the site to the planted chestnuts in a transition that
does not greatly disturb the ecological conditions, particularly of the
forest floor. Rapid disintegration of the mantle of leaf mold is
prevented by the partial shading which the dead or dying overstory,
girdled trees cast." This may seem to some a rather drastic method, but
when so much is at stake, namely the re-establishment of the chestnut in
our forests, it would seem a justifiable experiment on a small area.
In March, 1947, we supplied Dr. Diller with one hundred seedlings, one
or two years old, of our best stock, for underplanting in two of these
selected sites, fifty seedlings each, namely on the estate of Mr. E. C.
Childs at Norfolk, Connecticut, and on lands of the T. V. A. at Norris,
Tennessee. Our best wishes for a successful blight-resistant future go
with these little trees.
_Grafting Work._ We are continuing with our method of "inarching" young
"suckers" from below a blighted area into the trunk above the lesion,
the diseased tissue of the lesion being first cut out. This method (see
Brooklyn Botanic Garden Chestnut Breeding Project. 35th Annual Report of
Northern Nut Growers Association for 1945. pp. 22-31--1945) is entirely
successful in case we desire to preserve partly resistant hybrids of
good parentage for future breeding and for scions. (Figs. 1 and 2) But
inarching of the native chestnut is for the most part unsuccessful
because the fungus grows too rapidly and girdles the stem, killing the
parts above before the inarched tips of the suckers can take hold. There
seems to be a certain relation between the amount of disease resistance
in the tree and the possibility of restoring it to health by the
inarching method.
By the common ordinary cleft-graft method, using Japanese, or better,
Chinese stock we are adding to the supply of our most desirable hybrids.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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