ENGLISH WALNUTS.
Names have interesting histories. The English Walnut came to the Boston and New York markets from English shipping houses, before commerce had established more direct lines of steamships between the United States and the southern ports of Europe, and before California began to supply the country with home-grown nuts of the same kinds. English walnuts, indeed! Not a nut ever ripens on the fine walnut trees that are planted on the "snug little island," because the season is not long enough nor warm enough to complete the job the tree undertakes. Accept ing the fact, the English growers harvest the wal nuts when the shells are soft enough to thrust a knitting needle through with ease. Then the housewives pickle the fruit, husks and all, and make catsup of them. Both are fine as relishes with cold meats.
"Persian walnut" is the most accurate name for the tree we are discussing, for its native home is on the hillsides of Persia and Asia Minor. The tree in the woods bore nuts that savage men har vested in the early times, before history was writ ten at all. This tree was among the first to be cultivated. The nuts were gathered and planted in countries to the west. Classical literature tells of Juglans, "the acorn of Jove," that kings sent as presents to other kings in countries where this rich delicacy was not grown. So the nut, Juglans regia, "fit for kings," made its way into France, where most of the horticultural work of im provement was accomplished. Large nuts, with rich flavor and thin shells, were grown centuries ago.
The herballist and botanist, Parkinson, wrote in 164o about a kind of "French wallnuts, which are the greatest of any, within whose shell are often put a paire of fine gloves, neatly foulded up together." He astonished his English readers further by describing another variety "whose shell is so tender that it may easily be broken be tween one's fingers, and the nut itself is very sweete." No wonder the English gardeners were keen to grow these "wallnuts," and grieve to this day that they cannot ripen the nuts.
Southern California raises walnuts equal to those of the south of Europe. The climate, near
the coast, is mild and equable, and the air moist. Irrigation, with good drainage, and garden till age, complete the list of the tree's requirements, and it flourishes like the biblical green bay tree. Twenty years of growth have produced trees sixty feet in height and spread, that yield six to eight hundred pounds of nuts per tree.
Compute the market value of that crop at the retail price your grocer charges. Charge half to cost of raising the crop and getting it to the wholesaler. Then you can understand why wal nut growing is an industry that is spreading rapidly into new territory.
I think it must add to a walnut farmer's satis faction to look back along the trail that brought this tree from the wild woods of Persia to the garden-orchards of his San Fernando Valley, behind Los Angeles, and to know that it is more than ever before a tree that bears nuts "fit for kings' tables." No longer is it what the name walnut means, "a nut from a far country," but a home-grown product of American orchards, and cheap enough so that the people can use it as an everyday food, more wholesome and better in all ways than meat.
The wood of the English walnut is beautiful and valuable, the best in the world for gunstocks. Once there was a craze for walnut furniture in Europe that lasted until mahogany, from Central American forests, set fashion chasing after the newest thing. The wars between European nations exhausted the marketable walnut lumber, and the threatened famine in material for gun stocks led to the passing of a law in several coun tries, during the seventeenth century, that before a certificate of marriage could be obtained, the young man applying must show a certificate setting forth that he had planted the required number of walnut trees. These plantations, made no doubt under protest, in many cases, brought wealth to their owners, in nuts and then lumber, in the years that followed. It is a pity that to day Italy, whose walnut lumber ranked highest in quality, should not cover her bare hillsides with the same trees, and so restore the waste land to productiveness and beauty.