The purple raspberry resulted from crossing the red and black raspberries. All our cultivated strawberries are descended from crosses between the native Virginia strawberry and the Chilean strawberry. The valuable new plums from the Minnesota Experiment Station resulted from crossing the native American plum, Prunus americana with the Japanese plum, P. salicina. Many of our best grapes, the Boysenberry, the Kieffer pear, and various citrus varieties are species hybrids. We must not generalize too much as to the merit or lack of merit of species-hybrids. Some are very good and of great economic importance. Many others of which we never hear are without merit, often being discarded, leaving only a few lines in a notebook to record their characteristics. * * * * * Mr. Stoke: Would you consider chestnut hybrids worth while? Mr. Slate: If you can get everything you need from the Chinese chestnut I see no reason for hybrids with any other. Mr. Stoke: Dr. Arthur S. Colby has made a number of hybrids between Fuller and Chinese. I consider his hybrid No. 2 as promising; the nut is large, beautiful and of good quality. So far I have found no weevils in this hybrid. The bur is very thick and fleshy, with close-set spines. Possibly the curculio is not able to penetrate the thick husk in laying its eggs. Colby No. 2 is the most rapid grower of all my chestnuts. PECANS WITH COMPANION EVERGREENS[15] Twenty years of experimenting with pecan trees at the Iowa Park station have revealed that pecans in the Wichita irrigated valley of Texas do very poorly in buffalo grass or Bermuda sod, much better when given clean cultivation, but best of all when planted with or near evergreens, particularly conifers. [Footnote 15: Forty-Eighth Annual Report, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station. P. 42. 1945.] In 1926 some pecan trees were set along the west line of the farmstead. Most of these died soon after setting and the few that survived did not grow satisfactorily. Later, a general farmstead improvement program called for Arizona cypress along this line. In 1933, when these pecan trees were seven years old, they had made little growth and were in such poor condition that it was decided to ignore them and set the cypress on equal spacings. Some of the cypress trees were placed very near pecan trees while others were farther away. None of the pecans were removed, however.