The Walnuts and the Hickories 



As a fruit tree the shagbark deserves our best attention, No 

 other hardy nut tree compares with it in commercial importance. 

 The value of its lumber has led to the sacrifice of the large trees 

 in the woods. The nuts are diminishing as a wild crop, but the 

 demand is ever increasing. Hickory-nut orchards are being 

 planted. Nurserymen are studying how best to propagate the 

 trees, and to improve the varieties. "Hales' paper-shell hickory 

 nut" was discovered on a single tree in New Jersey. The nuts 

 are unusually large and plump, with thin shells. The kernels 

 have superior delicacy and richness of flavour, and remarkable 

 keeping qualities. A shrewd man began to propagate this excep- 

 tional strain. Grafted trees of this variety are beginning to be 

 sold by nurserymen. Several other choice kinds from selected 

 seed are offered. As transplanting is attended by con- 

 siderable loss, it is best to plant the nuts where the orchard is 

 to stand. 



Hickory flowers are not conspicuous in colour or size, but 

 the tree is a wonderful spectacle throughout the spring. First, 

 the buds drop their two black outer scales, and the silky inner 

 ones glisten like lighted tapers on every upturned twig. They 

 grow in breadth and length as they loosen, and a cluster of leaves, 

 small but perfect, and clothed in the softest velvet stand revealed. 

 Then the great scales turn back like sepals of an iris, displaying 

 rich yellows and orange tones, softened and blended by their silky 

 coverings. The opening leaves, delicate in texture and colouring, 

 may easily be mistaken for parts of a great flower. 



But the leaves soon declare themselves, and the scales fall. 

 The tree is then draped in long chenille fringes of green. The wind 

 shakes the pollen out of these staminate catkins, and the incon- 

 spicuous green nut flowers, clustered in the tips of leafy shoots, 

 spread their stigmas wide to catch the vitalising golden dust. 

 The fringes now strew the grass under the tree; the bloom is past. 

 Summer matures the crop of nuts. 



The first frost hastens the opening of the thick husks. The 

 nuts fall, and schoolboys, who have marked the tree for their own 

 weeks before, are on hand to bag the crop to the last sweet nut, if 

 squirrels do not thwart them. In the open space in the barn loft 

 alongside of the bin where pears are spread out to mellow, the nuts 

 dry and sweeten. In the dead cold of winter evenings the story 

 of "Snow Bound," in modern settings, perhaps, but still the same 



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