Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Twelfth Annual Meeting | Page 6

country.
I wish to say in closing that we all highly appreciate the welcome that has been extended to us on behalf of the Mayor of this fine city.
THE PRESIDENT: Next on the program will come the report of the secretary.
THE SECRETARY: I regret the smallness of the secretary's accomplishment for the past year. Except for the editing of the annual report--which is much a matter of cutting out superfluous words--and the effort to get speakers for this convention, he has attempted very little.
This is not, however, for lack of things that could and should have been done. An energetic campaign for new members is the most obvious desideratum. The committee to prepare and issue a bulletin on the roadside planting of nut trees, arranged to give information for every part of the country, has been innocuous as well as useless. Perhaps this meeting will afford stimulus and material enough to get it to work.
I think that few of the members realize how the inactivity of the secretary has been more than made up for by the industry of the treasurer. Perhaps they are reciprocally cause and consequence. Not only has the treasurer discharged the usual duties of that office but he has also attended to most of the correspondence and clerical work. He has conducted the nut contests which, under his management, have developed to formidable proportions requiring immense expenditure of time and effort.
These nut contests have now become so widely known as to return us a good idea of what we may expect of the native nuts of the country. Undoubtedly we have not yet found the best nuts that this country produces, except perhaps in the case of the pecan. But Mr. Bixby's labors, continuing the work begun by Dr. Morris, have reached such results that I think he will be willing to say that we have nearly reached the limit of natural excellence in the nuts already discovered.
In fact it seems to me that we have reached the point where further improvement in nuts for cultivation is to be looked for especially from purposeful hybridizing by man. It should be another of the chief aims of this association to induce self-perpetuating institutions to get together the material necessary for such work. Such material already exists in incomplete form--incomplete, that is, especially in horticultural varieties--as in the Arnold Arboretum and in the Public Park at Rochester. The Arnold Arboretum, through our treasurer's efforts, has agreed to give more attention to nut growing and breeding. The St. Louis Botanical Garden and the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, through the efforts and generosity of Mr. Bixby and Mr. Jones, have made special plantings of horticultural varieties, and this summer the New York Botanical Garden was induced to set out a number of grafted and seedling nut trees given by Mr. Jones, Mr. Bixby, Mr. W. C. Reed, the McCoy Nut Nurseries and others.
But unless this association can keep their interest alive it is likely that some of these institutional plantings will be neglected, especially as regards the highest development of their possibilities. In one botanical garden visited this summer the casual nut tree plantings running back thirty years have been entirely neglected and the trees are stunted almost to extinction. I hope that our members will lose no opportunity to visit these institutions and ask to see the nut tree plantings. One or two such visits in a year will help to keep our wards in the institutional mind.
We cannot expect from these gardens, at present at least, interest in breeding experiments. That is more properly a function of agricultural experiment stations. These are so short manned and short funded, so absorbed in problems offering quicker results, that it is difficult to get them even to consider nut growing. I do not recall a single experiment station in the country where any nut breeding experiments are being conducted. A few manifest a little interest in planting horticultural varieties but the only breeding experiments that I know of, or at this moment recall, are those of Dr. Morris, Dr. Van Fleet, Mr. Forkert and Mr. Jones. All of these experimenters have produced results that more than indicate great possibilities.
Therefore I think that more of the energy of this association should be expended in influencing the self perpetuating horticultural institutions to see the importance of nut culture.
Attention should be called also to our treasurer's initiative, perseverance and industry in issuing Bulletin No. 5 on Nut Culture, in improving and reprinting our accredited list of nut nurserymen, in visiting, photographing and describing many of our important parent nut trees, in securing and distributing scions, in promoting experimental topworking of native nut trees in promising localities, in developing a varietal and experimental nut orchard which in time will be second to none in these respects, and