Part 3

The English walnut tree grows in England, but the nuts never have time to get ripe in that climate. They are gathered green, and pickled, husks and all. From English grandmothers we learned to pickle our own butternuts while the shells are still soft.

The earliest shipments of the walnuts of Europe came into this country from England. Probably merchants in London sent them to merchants in New York. The dealers did not ask where these walnuts grew, but told people who asked that they came from England. This explains the name by which everybody now calls them.

Far back in its history, this tree grew wild in Persia, and on the wooded hillsides of Asia Minor. The people gathered the nuts for food. It was the custom of visitors to send presents of these nuts back to their friends in Europe when they were travelling in the Orient, and discovered how very good these unknown nuts tasted. Englishmen were among these who were loud in praise of them. “Walnut,” the name they gave the trees, means “a nut that comes from a foreign country.” The Greeks had called it “Jove’s acorn,” for they could not think of any other name good enough. Kings sent presents of nuts to each other. Then people began to plant nuts, instead of eating them all, and gradually all the warmer countries of Europe found they could grow these walnuts.

The size and quality of the nuts improved under cultivation. Now there are many varieties, all larger, thinner-shelled, and better-flavoured than the original wild nuts that still grow in the forests of Asia Minor.

In the centuries when the countries of Europe were always at war with their neighbours, another reason for planting walnut trees was discovered. No wood was so good for gunstocks. No young man could marry until he had planted a certain number of walnut trees. This was the law in some countries in the seventeenth century. So multitudes of these trees were set out. Besides gunstocks, walnut wood was much in fashion for handsome furniture. A walnut forest was a very profitable crop to raise, for lumber alone. A tree that bore such nuts, while its trunk was growing big enough to go to the saw mill was doubly profitable. The people of the colder countries were ambitious to share in this prosperity. But an occasional winter of extra severity killed the young trees.

THE CHESTNUT AND CHINQUAPIN

Next to the hickory nuts, we must rank the chestnuts. Some may give them first place in the list of American nut trees. In England the chestnut trees one hears about are never praised for their nuts. English boys and girls do not eagerly plan for half-holidays spent in the jolly sport of chestnutting. Their chestnut trees turn out to be very familiar to our eyes. They are the horse chestnuts that we see so often at home. Their nuts are handsome enough, and quite worth gathering for use in some games, and just to have and to handle. But chestnutting! That is one of the great joys of October in our country, a thing no boy or girl would miss without bitter disappointment.

While the leaves turn yellow on the big trees, children and squirrels have their eyes on the clustered, spiny balls at the ends of the branches. “Not yet!” is the sign they read as plain as printed words. Warm days come and go, and the tree holds out its sign, even after the leaves begin to fall. Father and mother say: “Be patient!” But they do not remember how hard that is. It is a long time since they were eight and ten and twelve years old.

Then a cold night comes, and in the early morning a hoar frost is disappearing as the sun rises. Four seams can be seen on some chestnut burs, and the impatient boys throw clubs into the tree tops. But their fingers are sore with trying to pry the burs open. The nuts are cheesy and insipid.

“Just you wait a spell.” This is the advice of John, the raggedy man, who does the chores. “You can’t hurry up chestnuts. When they’re ready, I’ll take you where you can get a barrel of ’em, and not kill yourself, nor ruin your hands gettin’ ’em.” He sees the rising tide of fear before it is expressed in words, and answers mysteriously: “Nobody knows the place but me. Let the little fellers an’ the town folks hunt for nuts under the trees along the road. They’ll get a quart apiece, mebby, if they work half a day. The place I’m goin’ to, you can scoop ’em up in handfuls.”

The trees far back from the high road are certainly more generous to the few who find them than are the more accessible, and therefore more popular trees. Nobody “scoops them up in handfuls,” literally, for there are the burs, quite as prickly as before they split their four segments apart, and let the two or three nuts fall out. Careful and quick motions are needed to pick up the pointed nuts among the larger burs. But the game is most absorbing. If the bags fill slowly, there is the consoling thought that the shells are thin, and the nuts are almost solid meats. The busy picker stops now and then to sample a few. They certainly are riper and finer tasting than they were a short week ago.

Unopened or partly opened husks are often gathered. The nuts will ripen and roll out on the attic floor, or on the roof of the side porch. Few parties who go chestnutting content themselves with the loose nuts they gather. The end of the day is a scramble to fill the bags or baskets with hulls not yet fully open. Mittens faced with leather or made of canvas are a good protection for the hands.

The saddest news from the woods of the Northeast is that a disease that baffles the tree doctors has attacked and killed all the chestnut trees in the neighbourhood of the city of New York, and it is marching steadily westward. It has invaded New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A fungus attacking the living layer under the bark of a tree is working where no remedy can reach it. The tree loses vitality, but only when it is far gone does the disease break through the bark, and show itself as small, yellow pimples on the smooth bark of the branches. Out of these openings the spores escape,—minute germs of the disease. The wind scatters them. So do birds, insects, and squirrels. They lodge in cracks in the bark of other trees. Only chestnut trees catch the disease, though the germs fall everywhere. When it progresses far enough to produce a mat of fungus that encircles the trunk, the tree is girdled, its food supply is cut off, and death results.

The chinquapin is a Southern tree, which closely resembles the chestnut. It is usually shrubby and dwarfed in all of its parts. The nuts are about as large as our little hazel nuts, and each is alone in a spiny husk that parts into halves when mature. Five or six of these little burs are often borne on a single stalk.

In Arkansas the tree reaches medium size, but in the East it is familiar as a scrubby tree that sends up suckers from the roots and forms thickets, like hazel brush. Poor folks in the South have time to gather these little nuts, which appear on market day in their season in some cities and towns. They are sweet, and some people think they are better than chestnuts.

THE BEECH

Least of all the nuts good to eat that grow in our mixed woods is the fruit of the grey-trunked beeches. In nutting time the beech tree’s crown of green is almost as clean and bright as in midsummer. The silky leaves are little torn by the wind. They turn to a beautiful pale yellow, and become thin and papery as the green pulp is drawn back into the twigs. Few people see the spiny green burs on the ends of side twigs in summer, even though the crop of nuts be heavy. In the autumn the brown spiny husks open. Their four divisions flare outward, and two triangular brown nuts are released. Almost unnoticed they drop on the ground under the tree. They are so little that the wind helps to scatter them in the woods around. The shifting leaf carpet sifts them through, and we shall have to hunt for them, even under the parent trees.

I need not tell any boy or girl how good and sweet these beech nuts are, and how well they repay the trouble of getting the kernels out of the thin, triangular shells. Yet people gather them less frequently than they do chestnuts, because it is slow work, and there is more accomplished under trees whose nuts are larger.

The early settlers fattened their pigs in autumn by turning them into the woods. Beech trees made the best possible pasture for this purpose. The flavour of beech nut bacon is exceptionally delicate, and has an extra high market value. Squirrels and all of the smaller furry-coats take the time and trouble to gather and hoard quantities of beech nuts among their winter stores.

Fortunate for the beech tree, its nuts will grow even in the shade. We shall find a fruiting beech tree surrounded by its children—saplings of all ages, coming up from seeds of various sowings.

By scratching carefully among the dead leaves in spring, we shall find, among the gaping burs, the young trees at the very beginning of their lives. The nuts have slipped down into the damp leaf mould, and the melting of snow, and the warm spring air have started them growing. The triangular shell clings to the top of the stem, while the root is getting a foothold. A pair of broad seed leaves, totally unlike the leaves of the beech tree, unfold. The spreading of these seed leaves soon splits the walls of the nut-shell helmet.

Little beech trees at this age are very weak and helpless, but patient and struggling. Their pale leaves turn green as the root goes deeper down, and draws food from the soil. A shoot bearing true beech leaves rises from the tip, between the seed leaves. The stem straightens, and grows tall, the seed leaves wither, and, unless it has bad luck, or some accident befalls it, the little tree is a long, leafy whip by the end of the season, and under each green leaf is a long bird’s-claw beech bud, just like those on the parent trees. In these buds are leafy shoots which will be side branches during the following summer.

Beech nuts are still one of the main foods of many wild animals. In the earlier days they had much greater importance, for nuts were one of the natural foods upon which the human race subsisted before the days when men became civilised. They depended upon foods which Nature provided, and ate them without cooking. Acorns served the same important purpose.

We cannot go back to the days when men lived in caves, and dressed in the skins of wild animals, and lived upon foods like nuts and berries, and the flesh of wild beasts. But in camping out we return as closely as possible to the simple life of these wild ancestors of ours. It is good to know what foods the forest offers to hungry men and beasts. Some day we may be lost in the woods. We may come to an oak tree, and attempt to eat its acorns, but find them bitter. It is well to know that the oaks with finger-pointed leaves bear acorns that are sweet and good. It is only the oaks with spiny-lobed leaves whose acorns are bitter and unfit for food. Beech trees offer no food to a hungry person, unless he knows how little the nuts are, and how they hide by slipping under the leaves when they fall. To know trees is delightful at any time, and in any place. To know them when one is lost in a forest is often the means of saving one’s life. The forest still feeds the hungry, but only those who know the trees are able to find these stores of food when they need them.

THE WITCH HAZEL

The witch hazel is indeed the witch of the woods. It turns the year up-side-down, by blossoming in October, at the same time that it is ripening its seeds. For this reason every child who lives in a region where this little tree grows should know the witch hazel. The better people know it, the more wonderful they find it. It has many odd habits and secrets, which it will reveal only to those who come and ask questions, and keep their ears and eyes wide open to catch the answers.

In spring the witch hazel hides under its green leaves, and attracts no attention from those who have come out to see the great procession of the spring flowers, under foot, and over head. It is simply a part of the undergrowth, a shrubby little tree. But come in October, to the same place. The acorns are dropping from the oak, the foliage ablaze with colour, or faded and falling. There are no flowers overhead, but a few belated asters and goldenrods under foot. Squirrels are busy hiding winter stores, gathered under the nut trees, and on the wild hawthorns.

A thicket of witch hazel is slowly dropping its yellowing leaves. You might not have noticed it at all, had not one of the trees suddenly called attention to itself by tweaking your ear! It is such a surprise to feel in the silent woods the sharp sting of a shot from a silent air gun. You stand still, listening, and feeling of your ear. It is a fine frosty October day, and still. As you listen, another shot strikes the dead leaves at your feet. Where do they come from? This question you will probably not be able to answer at once; but while you are looking in the bushes from which the missile seemed to come, thinking to rout some joker from his ambush, you discover the blossoms of the witch hazel. Each one is waving four little yellow petals, and among these delicate blossoms the bullet pods are bunched. Some of these are yawning wide open, each showing two empty seed pockets, but you do not find any seeds.