PECAN
(Hicoria Pecan)
The name is pecan in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, and Kansas; pecan nut and pecan tree in Louisiana. The name is of Indian origin, and means walnut. The tree’s natural range is smaller than the present area in which the tree is found, for it has been extensively planted in recent years. It is found as far north as Iowa, south to Texas, and east to Alabama and Kentucky. The highest development of the wild tree is in the lower Ohio valley. Forest trees were once found there which were said to be six feet in diameter and 170 high. Specimens that large would be hard to find now.
The pecan is a hickory. As to wood, it is the poorest of the hickories, and as to nuts it is the best. Its compound leaves are from twelve to twenty inches long with from nine to seventeen leaflets. The latter are from four to eight inches in length, and from one to three wide. The first pairs on the petiole are smallest. The fruit grows in clusters of from three to eleven, the number exceeding any other hickory. The nuts are four-angled, and long for their width.
The wood of pecan has disappointed those who have attempted to use it like other hickories. It does not differ much from them in appearance, but it falls low in mechanical tests. In strength, toughness, and stiffness it is inferior to the poorest of the other hickories. It has less than half the strength and half the stiffness of shagbark hickory. It is a fairly good fuel, but is high in ash.
The inferior quality of the wood has saved many a pecan tree from the sawmill and the wagon shop. Fine trunks stand near public highways, along river banks, and in fields, while all merchantable hickories of other species have been sent to market. The uses of the wood are few. If some of it goes to wagon shops or to factories where agricultural vehicles are made, it is employed for parts which are not required to endure strain or sustain sudden jars.
Fortunately it is a tree with a value of another kind. It is the most important nut tree of the United States at this time, and it promises to remain so. The forest-grown pecans were an article of food for Indians who once lived in the region, and though white settlers who succeeded the Indians as occupants of the land, depended less upon forest fruits than the red men had done, yet the pecan was often of supreme importance in the early years of settlement. The nuts have constituted an article of commerce ever since the region had markets.
Nurserymen were not slow to recognize the value of the pecan tree for planting purposes, and nursery grown stock has been on the market many years. Extensive orchards have been planted in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and other southern states, and some of the earliest of these orchards are now in bearing. However, by far the largest part of pecans on the market is wild fruit from the forests. Many are shipped in from Mexico, but most grow in the rich woods of southern states. They are gathered like chestnuts in northern woods. The people who pick them sell to local stores at low prices, often taking pay in merchandise. Buyers collect the stock from country and village merchants, and put it on the general market, often at three or four times the price paid to the gatherers of the nuts.
One of the most important matters connected with pecan is the large number of horticultural varieties which have been produced by cultivation and selection. More than seventy have been listed in nursery catalogues and special reports. Some of the nuts are twice the size of those of the forest, and shells have been reduced in thinness until some of them are really thinner than they should be to stand the rough usage which comes to them in reaching markets.
Dealers occasionally polish pecans to impart the rich, brown color which is supposed to give them the appearance of being fresh and of high grade. The polishing is produced by friction, when the nuts in bulk are shaken violently. Last year’s stock takes on as bright a polish as fresh stock, and the color and smoothness alone are not sufficient to prove that pecans are fresh from the trees.
The planted pecan tree grows rapidly and is as easily raised as fruit trees. The wild tree is long-lived, and the cultivated varieties will probably be like it.
Nutmeg Hickory (Hicoria myristicÆformis) is so named because the nut has the size and the wrinkled surface of a nutmeg, though the shape is different. The husk enclosing the nut is almost as thin as paper. The only other name by which it is known is bitter waternut, in Louisiana. The name scarcely applies, for the kernel is said not to be bitter. The range of nutmeg hickory extends from the coast of South Carolina to Arkansas. It is rather abundant in Arkansas, but scarce in most other parts of its range. The tree has several interesting features. It was partly discovered a long time before the discovery was complete. In 1802 Andre F. Michaux saw the nut and to that extent the species was discovered, but many years passed before a full description was given to the world by a competent botanist. The wood rates among the strongest and stiffest of all the hickories, according to present information; but the calculations were based on too few tests to be considered final. Two samples of wood procured near Bonneau’s depot, South Carolina, by W. H. Revenel, showed the remarkable breaking strength of 19,822 pounds per square inch, and the measure of stiffness exceeded 2,000,000 pounds to the square inch. That strength is sixteen per cent above shagbark. The weight of nutmeg hickory is 46.96 pounds to the cubic foot. The wood is hard, tough, and compact. The structure, including pores, medullary rays, annual rings, springwood and summerwood, is similar to the wood of other hickories. Trees grow best in sandy soil but near swamps and rivers where there is plenty of water. The largest trunks are eighty or one hundred feet in height and two in diameter. When use is made of this hickory it serves the same purposes as the wood of other trees of the group. It is never reported separately in statistics of wood utilization. It is too scarce to be important as a timber tree. It apparently has a future as an ornament, though it has not yet been widely planted. It has proved a success in the Carolinas and it thrives in the climate of Washington, D. C. The luster of its foliage makes it the most beautiful of the hickories. In common with other members of the genus, its long taproot renders the transplanting of nursery stock difficult.
Water Hickory (Hicoria aquatica) is known as swamp hickory in South Carolina, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana; bitter pecan in Mississippi and Louisiana, and water bitternut in Tennessee and South Carolina. The northern limit of this species is in Virginia near Mobjack bay, the southern limit in the Caloosa valley, Florida, west to the Brazos river, Texas, and north to southern Illinois. The wood is hard, heavy, strong, but rather brittle; the sapwood is thick and often is nearly white, while the heartwood is dark brown. It is the most porous of the hickories, and the pores are distributed generally through the annual rings of growth. In other hickories they are largely restricted to the inner part of each ring, though a few are dispersed through all parts. In swamp hickory there is little difference in appearance between the wood grown early in the season and that produced later. The tree is a rapid grower. It is an inhabitant of deep swamps, and if the land is inundated a considerable part of the year, the tree seems to grow all the better. At its best it may attain a height of 100 feet, and a diameter of two, but that size is unusual. The nut is small and wrinkled, and when broken open, pockets of red bitter powder are frequently found inside the shell. Usually the nuts are too bitter to be eaten, but it is said that near the western limit of the tree’s range, nuts are sometimes edible.
The only reported uses for the wood are fuel and fencing. It is poor fence material, because, like other hickories, it decays in a short time when exposed to weather. The wood of this genus is rich in foods on which decay-producing fungi feed. Fungus is a low order of plant life which sends its hair-like threads into the wood cells and consumes the material found there; but numerous insects bore into wood to procure food. Few woods suffer from such attacks more than hickory. Even after it is seasoned and manufactured into commodities, it is frequently attacked by various species of powder post beetles, and much injury results. Water hickory while yet standing is often greatly damaged by the larvÆ of certain moths which find their way into the soft wood just under the bark and tunnel minute galleries which subsequently fill with brown substance. According to R. B. Hough, these brown streaks in water hickory are hard enough to turn the edge of steel tools. They not only damage the structure of the wood but spoil its appearance.
Bitter Pecan (Hicoria texana) is a Texas species which has not been reported elsewhere. The average size of the tree is from fifteen to twenty-five feet in height and eight to ten inches in diameter; but in rich bottom land, particularly along the Brazos river, specimens sometimes attain a diameter of three feet and a height of 100. The leaves are from ten to twelve inches in length, with from seven to eleven leaflets. The nuts are very bitter, but are of approximately the same size and shape as edible pecans. The shells are thin and very brittle. The tree’s range extends inland 100 or 150 miles from the Texas coast.
North Carolina Shagbark Hickory (Hicoria carolinÆ-septentrionalis) is found in the neighboring parts of the four states: North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Alabama. In the best land this tree is occasionally eighty feet high and two or three in diameter, but when it occurs on dry hillsides its average height is twenty or thirty feet, and its diameter about a foot. The compound leaves are from four to eight inches long, with usually three, but occasionally five leaflets. The sweet nuts are small and brown. The bark separates into thick strips a foot or more in length and three or four inches wide. The rough trunk resembles the northern shagbark hickory. The wood is very tough, strong, and hard, the heart light reddish-brown, the thin sapwood nearly white. It is not distinguished from the other hickories in commerce, and it has the same uses when any use is made of it.
Pecan branch
