Elliott
Chance seedling
The record
- Parentage
- Chance seedling
- Origin
- Milton, Florida — a seedling found by H. Elliot · circa 1912
- Rights
- freely propagated — A chance seedling found around 1912, long predating the US Plant Patent Act of 1930. No IP claim found in the sources consulted.
- Also known as
- Elliot
- Scab
- Highly resistant, and long valued for near-immunity in humid climates
- Pollination
- Type II, protogynous
- Nut
- Small, with kernels of high quality
Description
The scab-resistant chance seedling that the humid southeast leaned on for a century before anyone bred a replacement.
It is a small nut, which is why it never displaced ‘Stuart’ or ‘Desirable’ commercially, and it is the reason growers kept it anyway: a tree that does not need spraying earns its place on a different ledger than a tree that yields more per acre. For a food forest, where nobody is running a fungicide schedule, that trade goes the other way entirely.
Worth noting the spelling. The finder was H. Elliot, one T, and the cultivar is written both ways in the trade. Same plant.
Where to find it
No source recorded. That does not mean the cultivar is unavailable, only that this record does not yet name a nursery carrying it. Point us at one and it goes in.