THE HICKORIES 41 



The Pignut 



H, glabra, Britt. 



The pignut deserves the better name, "smooth hickory," 

 a more ingratiating introduction to strangers. A graceful, 

 symmetrical tree, with spreading limbs that end in deli- 

 cate, pendulous branches, and gray bark checked into a 

 maze of intersecting furrows, it is an ornament to any park, 

 even in the dead of winter. In summer the tree laughs in 

 the face of the sun, its smooth, glossy, yellow-green leaflets, 

 five to seven on a stem, lined with pale green or yellow. In 

 spring the clustered fringes among the opening leaves are 

 the green and gold stamen flowers. The curiously angled 

 fertile flowers, at the tips of twigs, are green, with yellow 

 stigmas. Autumn turns the foliage to orange and brown, 

 and lets fall the pear-shaped or rounded fruit, each nut 

 obscurely four-angled and held fast at the base by the thin, 

 4-ridged husk, that splits scarcely to the middle. The 

 kernel is insipid, sometimes bitter, occasionally rather 

 sweet. Country boys scorn the pignut trees, leaving their 

 fruit for eager but unsophisticated nut-gatherers from the 

 towns. 



Pigs used to be turned into the woods to fatten on beech- 

 and oak-" mast." They eagerly devoured the thin-shelled 

 nuts of H. glabra, and thus the tree earned the friendly re- 

 gard of farmers, and a name that preserves an interesting 

 bit of pioneer history. 



The range of the pignut is from Maine to Florida on the 

 Atlantic seaboard, west to the middle of Nebraska and 

 Texas, and from Ontario and Michigan south to the 



