expected a crop of nuts from it that year, but none developed.  The same thing happened in 1938.  I then wrote to Miss Riehl about it, also asking her where to look for the pistillate blossoms.  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.  Some of these were seedlings and some were grafted trees, not over a dozen of them alive today and none have produced mature nuts.  Seemingly they have not been hardy although they have grown large enough to produce both staminate and pistillate blooms; they have never winter killed back to the ground, however.

Also, I have been planting nuts from all sources from which I could obtain them, mostly of the Chinese chestnut type.  Some of these nuts were results of crosses, and showed their hybridity in the young seedlings that resulted there from.  Today I have perhaps 150 of such young seedlings which I am pampering with the hope of getting something worthwhile from them.  One of the big thrills of chestnut growing was the result of a chestnut that I picked up from a plant that was no higher than 2 feet, growing at Beltsville, Maryland in the government testing ground there, in 1937.  My records show that this plant began to bear nuts in 1943 and have subsequently borne several crops in between the times that it was frozen to the ground and grew up again, which happened at least three times.  Like most chestnuts this one has to be pollinated by taking the staminate bloom from a dwarfed chestnut nearby whose bloom coincides with the blossoming of the female flowers of this Chinese hybrid.  Chestnuts rarely set any nuts that produce mature seed from their own pollen but depend on cross-pollination.  The nut from this hybrid is also the largest of any that I have grown and to my taste is a palatable one.  It may not rank among the best ones of known varieties