THE CALIFORNIA WALNUT.
The California walnut is a stocky, round-headed tree, with heavy, drooping branches, and bark that is white and smooth on limbs and on trunks of young trees. Ultimately the trunk turns nearly black, and is checked into broad, irregular ridges. In bottom lands, along the courses of rivers, back thirty miles from the coast, these trees are found, from the Sacramento Valley to the southern slopes of the San Bernardino Mountains.
The foliage is bright pale green, feathery, the leaflets often curved to sickle form, showing paler silky linings.
Californians admire and plant this tree for shade and orna ment. Its greatest value is as a hardy stock upon which the "English" walnut is grafted by nurserymen, for plant ing orchards of this commercial nut. The fruit of the native nut is excellent, but it cannot compete with the thin-shelled nut that came from Persia, via England.