Growing Nuts in the North

Almost everyone can remember from his youth, trips made to gather nuts. Those nuts may have been any of the various kinds distributed throughout the United States, such as the butternut, black walnut, beechnut, chestnut, hickory, hazel or pecan. I know that I can recall very well, when I was a child and visited my grandparents in New Ulm and St. Peter, in southern Minnesota, the abundance of butternuts, black walnuts and hazels to be found along the roads and especially along the Minnesota and Cottonwood river bottoms.

Since such nut trees were not to be found near Springfield, where my parents lived, which was just a little too far west, I still associate my first and immature interest in this kind of horticulture with those youthful trips east.

The only way we children could distinguish between butternut and black walnut trees was by the fruit itself, either on the tree or shaken down. This is not surprising, however, since these trees are closely related, both belonging to the family Juglans. The black walnut is known as Juglans nigra and the butternut or white walnut as Juglans cinera. The similarity between the trees is so pronounced that the most experienced horticulturist may confuse them if he has only the trees in foliage as his guide. An experience I recently had is quite suggestive of this. I wished to buy some furniture in either black walnut or mahogany and I was hesitating between them. Noting my uncertainty, the salesman suggested a suite of French walnut. My curiosity and interest were immediately aroused. I had not only been raising many kinds of walnut trees, but I had also run through my own sawmill, logs of walnut and butternut. I felt that I knew the various species of walnut very thoroughly. So I suggested to him:

"You must mean Circassian or English walnut, which is the same thing. It grows abundantly in France. You are wrong in calling it French walnut, though, because there is no such species."

He indignantly rejected the name I gave it, and insisted that it was genuine French walnut.

"Perhaps," I advised him, "that is a trade name to cover the real origin, just as plucked muskrat is termed Hudson seal."

That, too, he denied. We were both insistent. I was sure of my own knowledge and stubborn enough to want to prove him wrong. I pulled a drawer from the dresser of the "French walnut" suite and asked him to compare its weight with that of a similar drawer from a black walnut suite nearby. Black walnut weighs forty pounds per cubic foot, while butternut weighs only twenty-five. He was forced to admit the difference and finally allowed my assertion to stand that "French walnut" was butternut, stained and finished to simulate black walnut. Since it would have been illegal to claim that it was black walnut, the attractive but meaningless label of "French walnut" had been applied. Although it is less expensive, I do not mean to imply that butternut is not an excellent wood for constructing furniture. It ranks high in quality and is probably as durable as black walnut. I do say, though, that it was necessary for me to know both the species names and the relative weights of each wood to be able to distinguish between them indisputably.

An instance in which the nuts themselves were useless for purposes of identification occurred when I sent some black walnuts to the Division of Pomology at Washington, D. C. These were the Ohio variety which I had grafted on butternut roots. The tree had been bearing for three or four years but this was the first year the nuts had matured. During their bearing period, these black walnuts had gradually changed in appearance, becoming elongated and very deeply and sharply corrugated like butternuts although they still retained the black walnut flavor. Because of this mixture of characteristics, the government experts had great difficulty in identifying the variety, although the Ohio was well known to them.

Another variety of black walnut, the Thomas, I have also known to be influenced by the butternut stock on which it was grafted, when in 1938, one of my trees bore black walnuts whose meat had lost its characteristic flavor and assumed that of the butternut.

A

B

A-Genuine original Ohio Black Walnut from parent tree

B-Nut produced by grafting Ohio on Butternut

I also liked to pick hazelnuts when I was a boy. These are probably the least interesting among the wild nuts since they are usually small and hard to crack. There is much variation in wild hazels, however, and many people may recall them as being reasonably large. One of the two species abundant in Minnesota, Corylus cornuta or Beak hazel, has fine, needle-like hairs on its husk which are sure to stick into one's fingers disagreeably. When the husk is removed, Corylus cornuta resembles a small acorn. It does not produce in southern Minnesota and central Wisconsin as well as the common hazel, Corylus Americana, does, nor is its flavor as pleasing to most people. It is lighter in color than the common hazel and has a thinner shell. Of course, some hazels are intermediate or natural hybrids between these two species, and if the nuts of such hybrids are planted, they generally revert to one of the parents when mature enough to bear. This natural hybridization occurs among all plants, between those of the same species, the same genera or the same family. It is very rare between plants of different families. The process is a very important one in horticulture and I shall explain some of the crosses which are well-known later in this book.

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