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 land, while the best (irrigated) rice land was twice as valuable as the best mountainside chestnut land above it.

Japan's mountain chestnut orchards do not differ greatly from those of Europe. As I observed the mountainsides of Japan, the conspicuous thing about them seemed to be the small area given to tree crops. This seems unfortunate when one considers the great proportion of Japanese land that is not tillable and the great need for food in that crowded land. Perhaps the chief reason for the small extension of hillside chestnut growing in Japan is to be found in the widespread practice of cutting grass and herbage from the hillsides annually and carrying it down to fertilize the rice fields in the flat lands. The mountainside cannot yield fertilizer and wood and also nuts, as the Koreans have so sadly proved. It erodes.

Orchards of either nuts or fruit are not common in China, but scattered trees for fruit and nuts are widespread in many hilly localities. The Chinese chestnuts are more like the American nut in flavor, and many are larger in size. Chinese chestnuts hold great promise as a basis for an American crop that is now in its very early but unexpectedly promising youth.

A Chinese chestnut tree, leaving a stump 6 inches in diameter, cut in the spring of 1949, showed in 12 months 23 suckers more than five feet long—several of them were eight feet. It grew in fair circumstances, with no cultivation or fertilization. I incline to the belief that the Chinese chestnut is as keen a sprouter as was the old American.

The American chestnut is a fine tree for timber, and also a good producer of tannin. It has the good timber qualities of swift growth and ability to throw up shoots or suckers from the stump, if cut in the dormant season. The value of this is seen by comparison with pine. Cut down a pine, and it dies; cut down a chestnut and at the end of the first year the stump will have twenty or fifty shoots, some of them six feet high. At the end of the second year the suckers may well be eight to ten feet