Major varieties of northern pecan and find them preferable to northern
bitternut stocks with which the pecans are not compatible for long, as a
rule, such a union resulting in a stunted tree which is easily
winter-killed. Although the Posey continued to live for several years
our severe winters finally put an end to all these fine pecans. The root
system of the seedling understock continued to live, however.

I chanced to discover an interesting thing in the fall of 1941 which
suggests something new in pecan propagation. There were two small pecans
growing in the same rows as the large ones planted fifteen years
previously. When I noticed them, I thought they were some of this same
planting and that they had been injured or frozen back to such an extent
that they were mere sprouts again, for this has happened. I decided to
move them and asked one of the men on the farm to dig them up. When he
had dug the first, I was surprised to find that this was a sprout from
the main tap root of a large pecan tree which had been taken out and
transplanted. The same was true of the second one, except that in this
case we found three tap roots, the two outside ones both having shoots
which were showing above the ground. Another remarkable circumstance
about this was that these tap roots had been cut off twenty inches below
the surface of the ground and the sprouts had to come all that distance
to start new trees. All of this suggests the possibility of pecan
propagation by root cuttings. These two pecans, at least, show a natural
tendency to do this and I have marked them for further experimentation
along such lines.

On the advice of the late Harry Weber of Cincinnati, Ohio, an eminent
nut culturist, who, after visiting my nursery in 1938, became very
anxious to try out some of the Indiana varieties of pecans in our
northern climate, I wrote to J. Ford Wilkinson, a noted propagator of