264 Fruits and Fruit-Trees. 



walnuts, of vast dimensions, may be seen also in Scot- 

 land, as at Edmonstone, near Edinburgh; Gordon Castle, 

 Banffshire; Blair Drummond, Perthshire; and Eccles, 

 Dumfriesshire. Seedlings begin to bear at ten years old, 

 and every year, as it approaches maturity, like the orange, 

 this tree increases in fecundity. How long it can live is 

 not known, but the potential longevity is certainly very 

 great. In the Baidar Valley, near Balaclava, in the 

 Crimea, there is, or was recently, a walnut believed to be 

 a thousand years old. 



The flowers of the walnut-tree, like those of the hazel 

 and the chestnut, are of separate sexes. The staminate 

 ones form large, green, massive, very handsome, pendu- 

 lous catkins; the females, two or four together, are sessile 

 at the ends of young shoots, and have beautiful recurving 

 styles. They accompany the young foliage, and are in 

 perfection about the time of the blooming of the purple 

 rhododendron. 



Who is there that has not noticed the singular love of 

 rooks for things that men like, and their neglect of things 

 that men neglect? The love of the nut-hatch for the 

 fruit of the hazel is well known ; so is that of the cross- 

 beak for the pine-cone; the rook has no less earnest 

 an affection for the walnut. As soon as there is a kernel 

 worth eating, the rook finds it out. While upon the tree 

 the bird is powerless, so brings it to the ground. It has 

 not the power, either, to break the shell when hardened ; 

 it goes to those nuts only which are sufficiently soft to be 

 penetrated. 



