Page:Tree Crops (1953).pdf/143



Three men sat chatting at leisure under a chestnut tree on the little common of a Corsican village. It was a beautiful day in June. As the chestnut trees were only now blooming, it would be two full months before these men, one-crop farmers and owners of chestnut orchards, would have to go to work.

For miles I had ridden along a good stone road that wound in and out along the face of the mountainside, a mountainside that was much like my own Blue Ridge in Virginia, with one chief difference—this mountainside was higher and more prosperous than its Virginia prototype. The road at about two thousand feet above sea level went for miles along the mountain through a zone of chestnut orchards. In and out it went, in and out through coves and around headlands. Down near the sea level it was too dry for the chestnut, for Corsica is a land of Mediterranean climate, with little summer rain at low altitudes. Up near the top of the mountain it was too cool for the chestnut; but throughout a middle zone one thousand feet or more in elevation from bottom to top, the chestnut was at home. I think that in fifteen miles I had not been more than one hundred yards from a chestnut tree. If I was correctly informed, every chestnut tree in the wide area that stretched up the slope and down the slope was a grafted tree. At frequent intervals I had