The English walnut trees are grown in orchards in Southern California.
These trees are quick to grow, and come early into bearing. When you buy
a pound of these thin-shelled nuts at the corner grocery store, you may
well wonder where they grew. Perhaps little children picked them up under
trees that grow in Italy or in Greece. Fine, large nuts come from France,
but none of them are raised in England. Many of the best nuts are raised
in California, where more and more trees of this kind are planted each
year. They grow in the Southern states, but have never been planted on a
large scale as a commercial nut tree.
The English walnut tree grows in England, but the nuts never have time to
get ripe in that climate. They are gathered green, and pickled, husks and
all. From English grandmothers we learned to pickle our own butternuts
while the shells are still soft.
The earliest shipments of the walnuts of Europe came into this country
from England. Probably merchants in London sent them to merchants in New
York. The dealers did not ask where these walnuts grew, but told people
who asked that they came from England. This explains the name by which
everybody now calls them.
Far back in its history, this tree grew wild in Persia, and on the wooded
hillsides of Asia Minor. The people gathered the nuts for food. It was
the custom of visitors to send presents of these nuts back to their
friends in Europe when they were travelling in the Orient, and discovered
how very good these unknown nuts tasted. Englishmen were among these who
were loud in praise of them. “Walnut,” the name they gave the trees,
means “a nut that comes from a foreign country.” The Greeks had called it
“Jove’s acorn,” for they could not think of any other name good enough.
Kings sent presents of nuts to each other. Then people began to plant
nuts, instead of eating them all, and gradually all the warmer countries
of Europe found they could grow these walnuts.
The size and quality of the nuts improved under cultivation. Now there
are many varieties, all larger, thinner-shelled, and better-flavoured
than the original wild nuts that still grow in the forests of Asia Minor.
In the centuries when the countries of Europe were always at war with
their neighbours, another reason for planting walnut trees was
discovered. No wood was so good for gunstocks. No young man could marry
until he had planted a certain number of walnut trees. This was the law
in some countries in the seventeenth century. So multitudes of these
trees were set out. Besides gunstocks, walnut wood was much in fashion
for handsome furniture. A walnut forest was a very profitable crop to
raise, for lumber alone. A tree that bore such nuts, while its trunk was
growing big enough to go to the saw mill was doubly profitable. The
people of the colder countries were ambitious to share in this
prosperity. But an occasional winter of extra severity killed the young
trees.