The Shellbark — the Best of Our Native Nuts—By J. W. Kerr, 
Mary- 
land 
PLANT A FEW NURSERY-GROWN TREES THIS FALL; ALSO SOW SELECTED NUTS 
AND TRY THE EXPERIMENT OF RAISING IMPROVED SEEDLINGS OF YOUR OWN 
veRY man who owns a piece of ground, 
be it farm or garden or suburban lot, 
should make it a matter of pride to have as 
many as possible of our native nuts growing 
and bearing for him. That this is also a mat- 
ter of economy will naturally occur to those 
who have to buy nuts and pay the fancy 
Plant nuts in nursery rows transplanting the bet- 
ter ones along the fences. They will be a good money 
investment. They bear in about twenty years 
prices of the fancy grocer. Now let us take 
for granted the possession of the land and 
the desire to plant nut trees. What shall he 
plant who desires an all-round useful nut? 
There is a most satisfactory answer to be 
had in the better types of shellbark. 
The shellbark or shagbark is often con- 
founded with the hickory. It may clear up 
this confusion a bit to state that all shell- 
barks are hickories but not all hickories are 
shellbarks. The quality of the timber of 
the shellbark is not so tough nor so flexible 
as some of the other hickories, and therefore, 
is not so valuable. 
The uncultivated native shellbark is 
found as far north as Massachusetts, and as 
far west as the Mississippi, but especially 
in that region from the southern third of 
New York state down through the Alleghany 
ranges to Tennessee. It is seldom found 
in the tidewater region of the Atlantic 
Coast, and favors — and can be grown in — 
any open, porous soil. 
The shellbark tree is stately and strong, 
fine in foliage and when not crowded, regular 
and handsome in form. Its bark is its 
distinctive characteristic, since, as its name 
would imply, the outer layer of bark shells 
or splits off as the tree attains age. But 
the process is perfectly natural and in no 
way hurtful. 
There has been little or nothing done for 
the improvement of the shellbark — indeed 
‘In nursery 
so little attention has been paid to it that 
thousands of fine trees have been used for 
fuel and lumber with no thought even of the 
commercial value of the nuts. In a few 
isolated cases nuts have been selected and 
planted with a view to improvement, but 
in doing so the influence of pollination by 
inferior types was not considered, and 
consequently little of real value has been 
accomplished. This is not fair to the nut, for 
it would be capable of much improvement, 
— but it is a lifetime job, for it takes from 
twelve to fifteen years for a tree to come into 
bearing, and one man cannot hope to see 
more than two generations of improved 
species. 
Propagation is rather a difficult matter, 
too, as the shellbark is far less easy to 
perpetuate than a fruit tree. The only 
successful methods in practice are annular 
budding and tongue grafting below the 
surface, and, since seedlings are not certain 
to keep the variety true, the finer varieties 
must be propagated in these two ways. 
Seedlings two or three years old, standing 
rows can be tongue-grafted 
with a fair degree of success by removing 
the soil about them to a depth of four or 
more inches, setting the grafts and care- 
fully replacing the soil. Grafts should 
grow two years before being transplanted. 
The transplanting of nursery-grown trees at 
five years of age, when they are five to seven 
feet in height, is attended with much work, 
as it is not advisable to shorten severely the 
tap root characteristic of all seedling-grown 
hickories. By running the modern tree- 
digger under the young trees while in 
nursery rows at two years and again at three 
years of age we cause a division of the tap 
root. When first cut, two, three, or more 
new tap roots start. These, cut again, tend 
to increase the number and thereby lessen 
the labor of transplanting. 
Shellbarks can be planted with safety 
size 
and relative meatiness of nuts. Two named types, 
Waugh above, Roosevelt below, about 4 size 
73 
These pictures show the variation of form, 
either in the fall or spring, because of their 
sturdy root system, although south of 4o 
degrees fall is the better season. Prune in 
the spring and get the trees into good bearing 
shape and height after which little or no 
pruning is necessary. Any nut-bearing 
tree can be transplanted with as great a 
degree of certainty as to its living as are 
fruit trees, if properly treated in the nursery, 
(as described above) prior to removal 
therefrom. Any good and fertile soil, light 
or heavy, such as would produce a good crop 
of corn will grow a nut tree. If it is desired 
to raise shellbarks from seed, plant the nuts 
in the fall. 
As an ornamental tree in more conventional places, 
the shellbark has dignity 
The shellbarks that we see in market come 
from Pennsylvania and the Middle West and 
are mostly gathered from forest trees, for 
the nut is not grown as a commercial crop 
anywhere. It would, however, be a good 
paying crop on soil that is unsuited to fruit, 
and trees might be planted along drives or 
fence-rows. They are regular bearers, 
almost as much so as a grape-vine, for they 
bloom after all danger from late frosts is 
over. A bushel anda halfisa good yield from 
a full grown tree. 
My own experiments with shellbarks have 
been very interesting and will, I hope, be 
of value to other nut enthusiasts. I planted 
some very choice seedling nuts, gathered in 
York County, Pennsylvania, in 1887, and 
let the seedlings grow in nursery rows until 
five years old. From these the most 
promising were selected and transplanted 
and ten or twelve years later they came into 
