The pignut has been given this ugly name because farmers, in the early
days, turned their pigs into woodland pastures to fatten on the
thin-shelled nuts that dropped from this kind of hickory tree. They are
not bitter, but merely tasteless, and it is only a “greenhorn” from town
or city who will spend time to gather these poor hickory nuts, mistaking
them for shellbarks. They are not usually angled, but smoothly rounded,
often pear-shaped, and the husks are thin. The shagbarks are in husks
nearly one-half inch thick, which split in four divisions, and fall apart
to release the ripe nuts. The husks of pignuts divide but part way down,
and so the nuts are not freed from them promptly. The kernels are
yellowish white.
A look at the bark of a shagbark hickory, and then at a pignut fixes in
mind one of the chief differences between these trees. The pignut has
clean, smooth, grey bark, becoming coarser and rougher with increasing
age, but never shedding its bark in ragged strips as the shagbark begins
to do when the trees are still young. Smoother foliage and twigs, smaller
buds in winter, and a more regular round head make the pignut a fine tree
to plant on the lawn, where the shagbark would be out of place, on
account of its shaggy, untidy trunk.
Another handsome hickory tree with nuts that are very disappointing to
the members of a nutting party is the mockernut, called also the big bud
hickory, and the white heart hickory. The last name is wrong because the
heart wood is brown, and it is the wood near the bark that is white. The
tree has the largest buds and the stoutest, clumsiest twigs and branches
in the whole hickory family. The leaves are correspondingly large,
sometimes nearly two feet long, of seven to nine leaflets, on downy,
swollen stalks. The catkins of the staminate flowers are like thick,
chenille fringes, six inches long, often longer, hanging in May below the
new leaves.
The nuts are large and look most promising at first. The big, four-parted
husk is as thick as a shagbark’s, but it does not split all the way down.
So the first difficulty is to get the nut out of the husk. The bony shell
is the next. It is astonishingly thick and hard to crack. Last
disappointment of all, the kernel is at best very small, and not worth
the trouble of getting it out, though there is no denying that it is
better-tasting than a pignut, and almost as sweet as a little shagbark.
Very often the shell contains a spongy substance that is tasteless,
instead of the kernel the patient nutter has a right to expect.
Crumple leaflets of this tree in your hand, and they smell fruity, like
an apple. They turn to yellow and russet in autumn.
The bitternut is a hickory nut whose kernel no squirrel eats. It is as
bitter as gall. Thin-shelled as a pignut, and usually less than an inch
in length, the nuts are enclosed in thin husks, that differ from others
in having thin ridges that rise along the four lines where they split at
the time the nuts are ripe. Two of these clefts run farther down than the
other pair. The nut shell is thin, slightly flattened sometimes, and
marked with dark lines. The kernel is white, and you will never taste a
second one.
The sure sign by which to tell the bitternut hickory is the tapering,
flattened, yellow bud. At any time of year a few, at least, of these buds
are to be found. They are numerous from midsummer till May; after that, a
few dormant winter buds remain to tell the tree’s name until the new buds
are showing in the angles between leaf and twig No other hickory has
little, yellow buds.
In winter the slimness of the twigs, and in summer the small size of the
leaflets make this the most delicately built of the hickories. The buds
are the smallest to be found on a hickory tree. Yet it is the quickest to
grow, and one of the handsomest trees in the family. Because it loves
best to grow with its roots in wet soil, it is called the swamp hickory.