In the 1930s, Cornell had a Johnny Appleseed of nuts. Horticulturist Lawrence H. MacDaniels, known as "Dr. Mac," planted or grafted hundreds of nut trees, including hickory, walnut, chestnut, pecan and filbert, in a remote corner of the Cornell campus.

For some 70 years, the six-acre spread just east of Cornell Orchards along Cascadilla Creek, between Game Farm and Judd Falls roads, lay dormant and became shrouded by a thick growth of honeysuckle. Today, the once-inaccessible woodlot not only has a name - the MacDaniels Nut Grove - but new paths and purposes: It's an outdoor classroom, research site, model forest farm and a resource for community education and outreach. It's also an heirloom nut grove and repository for temperate nut tree cultivars from which farmers and other kinds of growers can obtain scions, or cuttings, to graft onto root stocks. The grove is within a Cornell Plantations natural area called Upper Cascadilla, on the north side of Cascadilla Creek.

"It turns out that this is a unique collection of nut trees and that some of the varieties that we've found, in fact, exist only here," says Ken Mudge, Cornell associate professor of horticulture. "For all we know, some of them may prove valuable."

MacDaniels, a Cornell professor of pomology, died in 1986, but several years ago his friend, Brian Caldwell, a research associate in horticulture, introduced Mudge to a few of MacDaniels' grafted trees at the far west end of the nut grove.

"A few months later, I went back and explored the hillside further to the east and discovered many more grafted trees in a 2.5-acre section that we have been focusing our development on ever since," says Mudge. He and his colleagues, including Cornell Plantations natural areas director Nancy Ostman; Louise Buck, senior extension associate in natural resources; Keith Vanderhye, a woodsman, ethnobotanist and graduate student in horticulture; and other students, cut the honeysuckle away, cleared trails, installed stone steps and planted five kinds of berries.Mudge and his colleagues are now in the second year of a two-year grant from the Northern Nut Growers Association to evaluate the hickory cultivars on the site. "We don't even know the cultivar identity of most of the surviving trees, so we plan to assess both the nut yield and quality of the most promising hickories on the lot and identify them, if possible," Mudge says. "We also plan to reintroduce the best cultivars to growers, collect nuts from the nut grove and map the site with specific variety names."

Equally important is the transformation of the site into a forest farm. Students and members of the public are learning that besides trees, profitable forest plants include nuts, cultivated mushrooms, blueberries, other small fruits, ginseng and other medicinal herbs, ferns, orchids and other ornamentals and items for craft projects.

"Forest forming is particularly suited to the Northeast, where more than 60 percent of small farms have woodlots," says Mudge. "Those that are on steep slopes with poor soil are perfect places where farmers can forest farm to supplement their incomes." Mudge is monitoring the site to see if the small fruit species he and colleagues planted will yield sufficiently to be a profitable component of a multi-crop, multi-story forest farming system.

At the community entrance to the site on East Hill Recreation Way, a walking path on the old Lehigh Valley railroad bed off Game Farm Road, an information kiosk is now installed with an interpretive poster. Materials developed by students for self-guided tours soon will be posted.