BUTTERNUT
(Juglans Cinerea)

This tree is known as butternut or as white walnut in all parts of its range. Butternut is in reference to the oily kernel of the nuts, and white walnut is the name given by those who would distinguish the tree from black walnut. Persons acquainted with one of the species in its native woods are usually sure to be acquainted with the other, for their ranges are practically co-extensive, except that black walnut extends farther southwest, butternut farther northeast. Butternut grows from New Brunswick to South Dakota, from Delaware to Arkansas, and along the Appalachian highlands to northern Georgia and Alabama.

Butternut resembles black walnut in a good many ways and differs from it in several. They are very closely related botanically—as closely as are brothers in the same household. Black walnut is larger, stronger, better known, and has always dominated and eclipsed the other in usefulness and public esteem; yet butternut is a tree both useful and interesting. No person acquainted with both would ever mistake one for the other, winter or summer. Botanists tell how to distinguish butternut from black walnut by noting minor differences. The person who is not a botanist needs no such help. He knows them at sight, and there is no possibility of mistaking them.

Butternut in the forest may attain a height of eighty or 100 feet, and a diameter of three, but few persons ever see a specimen of that size, and never in open ground. In shade, the butternut does its best to get its crown up to light and sunshine, but it is weak. It often gives up the struggle and remains in the shade of trees which overtop it. In that situation its crown is small, thin, and appears to rest lightly in the form of a small bunch of yellowish-green leaves on the top of a tall, spindling bole, which is seldom straight, but is made up of slight, undulating curves. The pale, yellowish tinge of the bark suggests a plant deprived of sunshine.

When butternut grows in open ground where light falls upon its crown and on all sides, it assumes a different form and presents another figure. The trunk is nearly as short as that of an apple tree. It divides in large branches and limbs, and these spread wide; leaves are healthy, yet the crown of a butternut always looks thin compared with that of the black walnut. Tests show that butternut wood, when thoroughly dry, is somewhat stiffer than black walnut; but it is light and weak. It is about two-thirds as heavy and two-thirds as strong as black walnut. The growing tree betrays the wood’s weakness. Large limbs snap in storms. Trees become lopsided, and a symmetrical, well-proportioned butternut crown is an exception. The broken branches leave openings for the entrance of decay, and butternuts nearly always die of disease rather than of old age.

Leaves are compound, and from fifteen to thirty inches in length. Few trees of this country have larger leaves. There are from eleven to seventeen leaflets. They are hairy and sticky. Hands that handle them are covered with mucilage-like substance. The nuts, which grow in clusters of three or five, are of the same color as the leaves and covered with the same sticky fuzz. The nuts are two inches or more in length, and are borne abundantly when trees stand in open ground. Size rather than age appears to determine the period when trees commence to bear. Those of extra vigor produce when ten or twelve years old. The nuts are salable in the market. They fall with the leaves, immediately after the first sharp frost, and all come down together. A single day frequently suffices to strip the last leaf from a tree, though some of the nuts may hang a little longer. The kernels are very rich, when the nuts are dry, and are apt to cloy the appetite; but they are improved by freezing where they lie on the ground among the leaves; but they must be used quickly after they thaw, or they will spoil. Nuts nearly full-grown but not yet hard are made into pickles, but the fuzz must first be washed off with hot water.

Butternut bark has played a rather important role in the country’s affairs. Doctors in the Revolutionary war made much of their medicine of the roots and bark of this tree. Drugs were unattainable, and physicians were forced to betake themselves to the woods for substitutes, and their pharmacopoeias were enriched by the butternut tree. Housewives dyed cloth a brown color with this bark long before aniline dyes found their way into this country. Whole companies of Confederate soldiers from the mountain regions in the Civil war wore clothes dyed in decoctions of butternut bark, and popularly known as “butternut jeans.”

The annual output of butternut lumber is placed at a little more than 1,000,000 feet a year. It is widely used, but in small amounts. In Maryland it is made into ceiling and flooring; in North Carolina into cabinet work, fixtures for stores and offices, and into furniture; in Michigan its reported uses are boat finish, interior finish for houses, molding, and screen frames. In Illinois it is used for all the purposes listed above and also for church altars and car finish. These uses are doubtless typical, and hold good in all parts of the country where any use is made of butternut.

The wood has figure similar to that of black walnut, but the color is lighter. It is nearer brown than black. The pores are diffused through the annual ring, but are more numerous and of larger size in the inner than in the outer part. The springwood blends gradually with the wood of the latter part of the season, without sharp distinction, but the ring terminates in a black line which is the chief element of contrast in the wood’s figure.

The future value of butternut will be less in the lumber than in the nuts. The tendency in that direction is now apparent. When land is cleared, the trees which would formerly have gone to the sawmill, are now left to bear nuts. The averaged price paid by factories in North Carolina for butternut is $40 a thousand feet. It is cheaper in the Lake States.