Tag Archives: trees

Black Walnut Memories

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Description: jpeg image, Black Walnut fruit Ju...

Description: Black Walnut fruit (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Jim sent me this link to a news article on black walnuts.  I think his ulterior motive was to have me make the Black Walnut Pumpkin Pie recipe that it includes (it does sound yummy), which I will, but I know he has a soft spot in his heart for these trees and he wanted to share what he found.

Our Sharps Chapel property has a number of black walnut trees and every time we go by them, I want to experience their unique smell by either rubbing their highly pungent leaves or picking up a fallen walnut.  These trees bring back a lot of memories for me.

My Dad used to have some property in Spring Valley, Ohio that had quite a few black walnut trees.  When he bought the property, we found a homemade black walnut husker in the shed.  It was simply a piece of wood on a stand that had a hole in it just large enough to let the hard walnut shell fall through and leave the husk, when smashed with a hammer or mallet.  Boy was that a messy job. Our hands were black.  Years later when he sold the property, the new owner sold the trees for timber.  It broke our hearts.  It made financial sense, but we got more enjoyment out of the trees than money could buy.

Did you know that black walnut trees have bumper years and lean years, in terms of producing nuts?  We noticed that from experience.  This is nature’s way of controlling the populations of animals, such as squirrels, who feed off the nuts so that there are enough nuts left to produce more seedlings.

Years ago, I took a cream cheese ball appetizer to a party.  I will never forget the hostess asked what made my recipe so special — she had a similar recipe but mine tasted so much better.  I had added black walnuts!

Yes, I will make the Black Walnut Pumpkin Pie, but here is the other recipe in the article that I really want to try first and I think I will try it on the grill in my cast iron skillet.

Harry Truman’s Ozark Pudding

This is an interesting dessert, halfway between cake and pudding, something like Hugenot torte. Bess used to make it for Harry when he got homesick.

  • 1 egg
  • ¾ cup sugar
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1¼ teaspoons baking power
  • ¼ teaspoon salt
  • ½ cup chopped peeled apples
  • ½ cup chopped black walnuts
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla Whipped cream

Preheat oven to 350. Grease a 10-inch pie pan or 9-inch square pan.

Beat the eggs and the sugar together until smooth. Add the flour, baking powder and salt. Blend well. Fold in the apples, nuts and vanilla. Pour into the prepared pie pan and bake for 30 to 35 minutes. Remove from the oven. It will fall; it’s supposed to. Serve warm with whipped cream or ice cream.

Life is an Adventure!

Marcescent | Long-Clinging Leaves

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seeing-trees-bookI love to read non-fiction and I love nature, so when I found this new book in the library, I was so excited.  It is called Seeing Trees – Discover the Extraordinary Secrets of Everyday Trees by Nancy Ross Hugo. She is using “new eyes” to observe what is there in front of all of us and relating what she sees in a very entertaining fashion. The author’s enthusiasm for tree-watching is contagious and all I want to do is to run out into the woods and start discovering.

The photos are exceptional.  The photographer, Robert Llewellyn, has “mastered a new form of photography.  Using software developed for work with microscopes, he creates incredibly sharp images by stitching together eight to forty-five images of each subject, each shot at a different point of focus.”  They almost appear 3-D on the page with the white backgrounds.

Collecting leaves helps imprint leaf colors, textures, and shapes on our brains.  One game the author devised was to gather different colored leaves, while on a hike, and arrange them in her hand by color, like a hand of cards.  In her words:

“I arrange the leaves like a hand of cards, slipping a yellow tulip poplar leaf in here, moving an amber hickory leaf over in there, until I have a wide spectrum of leaf color.  In this collection, a dark maroon sweet gum leaf becomes as valuable as the ace of spaces, a blue leaf as exciting as a wild card.”

Beech Tree Near Creek at Sunset Bay, TNMarcescent Leaves

Early in the book, she defined “marcescent” — the name for old leaves that stay on the trees until a strong wind or new spring leaves push them off.  This reminded me of an opera appreciation lecture series I attended 25 years ago where the theme was “recitative” – where a singer is allowed to adopt the rhythms of ordinary speech — resembling sung ordinary speech more than a formal musical composition.  To this day I remember that phrase.  I hope “marcescent” stays with me as long.

Check out a previous post that I wrote about our beech trees which I now know have  “marcescent” leaves.  Life is an adventure.

 

Paw Paw – Fruit Tree Native to Tennessee

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ARS pawpaw

Paw Paw Tree Fruit

In my quest towards helping our woods become healthier, I’ve been trying to cull trash trees that might be choking out the natives.  Last summer, I came across these large-leafed, tropical looking trees.  They were growing in colonies along the wetter portions of our land — ravines and lowlands along creeks.  I was worried that they would shade out the native trees.

I’ve since learned that they are native and I’ve been prejudiced against them because of their “tropical” look, which in fact they get by being related to magnolias.

Last summer, I first started cutting down the saplings and flagged others that were too difficult to get to with all the summer vegetation, but then it occurred to me that I really did not know what the trees were.  Only now have I taken the time to research it and I’ve learned that these trees are Paw Paws — a native understory or woodland edge tree that grows to 25 feet tall and 15 feet wide, as individual trees.

Pawpaw fruits

Paw Paw Fruit

At first, the jury was still out on whether I want to keep them.  Some sources said that they are a “good” tree (presumably because they are native), but other Paw Paw sources said:

Pawpaws should gain in popularity because deer tend not to eat them. While they will eat the fruits which have fallen to the ground, it is thought that the unpleasant smell the stem emits when it is damaged keeps the tree from being palatable to deer. In fact, in certain areas along the C and O Canal, botanists feel that it is becoming a weed, taking over places that used to have a wide variety of species, but where seedlings of other trees are being gobbled up by deer, leaving the pawpaws to thrive.

The Ohio Division of Natural Resources Division of Forestry has a good write-up on the Paw Paw.  Among other things, it says:

  • One tree often gives rise over the course of decades to a sprawling colony via its root system, which suckers several feet away from the parent tree.
  • It is prized for its delicious fruits that mature in late summer.
  • As a member of the Annona Family, it is related to other species of Pawpaw as well as other genera in this family (all tropical or subtropical in origin) and distantly related to the Magnolias and Tulip tree.

But the following information might be swaying me to keep the trees (taken from an orchard site that sells Paw Paws for retail.  I have a soft spot in my heart for folk lore plants:

The Paw Paw is a true native American fruit tree indigenous to the entire eastern half of America, from Texas to the Great Lakes and down the east coast to Florida. The Paw Paw is rarely seen and hardly known by recent generations, but was a household name for the pre-baby boomer generations. Many old and now forgotten folk songs were sang praising the Paw Paw. Being the largest edible fruit native to America, the Paw Paw is worth singing about and has found some resurgent interest in the past 20 years.

 

Another Paw Paw source shares:

In the book, Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, one finds the Pawpaw fruit called “…a natural custard, too luscious for the relish of most people. The fruit is nutritious and a great resource to the savages.” Millspaugh, in American Medicinal Plants, describes the fruit as “soft, sweet and insipid, having a taste somewhat between that of the May-apple and the banana, tending to the former.”

OK.  I am going to keep them.  Nothing else is growing there anyway.