Her reply was a very encouraging one in which
she wrote that the pistillate blossoms appear at the base of the catkins
or staminate blooms, but that it is quite a common thing for chestnut
trees to carry the latter for several years before producing pistillate
blossoms. She also explained that it was very unlikely that the tree
would fertilize its own blooms, so that I should not expect one tree to
bear until other nearby chestnuts were also shedding pollen. This
occurred the next year and another chestnut close to the first one set a
few nuts. It was not until 1940 that the tree which had blossomed first,
actually bore nuts.
In 1940, I crossed the pistillate blossoms of this tree with pollen from
a Chinese variety called Carr, resulting in half a dozen nuts which I
planted.
Since the chestnuts in these parts do not bloom usually until early July
we can expect chestnuts to be a more reliable crop than butternuts, for
instance, which bloom very early in the spring about May 1 to 15th.
Having had this reward for my efforts I took much more interest in
chestnut growing and ordered trees of the Chinese varieties, Castanea
mollissma from J. Russell Smith, H. F. Stoke, and John Hershey.
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