WALNUTS
By SIR STEPHEN TALLENTS
THE walnuts of England did their bit manfully last autumn. Gilbert White, recording in his journal a bumper walnut crop in 1788, notes that it went with a fine wheat harvest, and recalls a saying from the Georgics (which one of his editors believes rather to refer to the almonds) that good nut and corn crops come together. 1942 did its best to confirm his observation. Certainly our walnut tree was faithful to the alliance. Some nuts the rooks devoured ; and some were gathered surrep- titiously and gobbled by the schoolchildren, whose mothers were at pains in the week of our walnut harvest to write to the head teacher, protesting that lips and fingers were not dirty, but unwash- able, owing to the stain. Yet we gathered nearly a hundredweight of nuts from the grass below our tree. The finest of them we salted down in red crocks—there was no coconut fibre last year to temper the salt's dampness. Over our wood fire of a night we stitched and eyeletted miniature sacks of hessian, gathering them at the throat with good brown fishing-line, and securing it with home-made toggles of home-grown sycamore and yew. Upon our sacks we embroidered simple designs and familiar initials. Then, filled with our walnuts, they went out as our presents of a war- time Christmas to the scattered children of the house and a few of its favourite visitors. Some of them had long journeys to make.
Our walnut tree, the experts say, must be about three hundred years old. That is no great age for a walnut : there is a tree still fruitful in a neighbouring village that is reckoned to have borne nuts in the days of Queen Elizabeth. But we are proud of our middle-aged veteran. Almost certainly it was planted by Abraham Hill, whose greater fame it is, as one of those who in Gresham College, on November 28th, 166o, heard Christopher Wren read a paper on astronomy, to have been a founder of the Royal Society. Its nuts are small—it takes a hundred of them to tilt the one pound scale, whereas the walnuts of commerce should not run more than forty-five to the pound. But they are well sealed, and their kernels crisp and sweet. Today our old walnut, scarred by a bomb of this war, looks down benignly upon the ranks of a new generation. Grafted some years ago now at the famous East Mailing Research Station with shoots brought from Asia, Europe and America, this young international brigade recalls in its names—Gulhak, Meylanaise, Eureka, Sorrento—the ancient lineage and wide wanderings of its tribe. The life of man upon this earth; it appears, would have to be multiplied more than one hundred and fifty times to match the life of the walnut family. Walnut remains have been found in strata older than the eighty million-year-old chalk downs of England. Walnuts, as we know and eat them today, have travelled to us across Europe from the East. Their name is Anglo-Saxon for the " foreign nut." They are said to have reached. Greece three
hundred years before the time of Christ ; and walnut shells, found among Roman remains below the Royal Exchange and elsewhere, suggest that the Romans brought them on the last stage of their pilgrimage to Britain, They have travelled, too, from Spain to South America, and from Britain and the Continent to the United States.
We in England have not made the most of this gifted immigrant. We have been content in bygone years to raise chance seedling trees, that have yielded too often ill-favoured nuts with tough- skinned and unshapely kernels. The French have been more provi- dent : they have long recognised the virtues of walnuts, of walnut timber, walnut oils and walnut dye. Evelyn recorded nearly three hundred years ago that " in several places betwixt Hanau and Frankfurt in Germany, no young farmer whatsoever is permitted to marry a wife, till he bring proof that he hath planted, and is a father of such a stated number of walnut trees." He declared also that of all walnuts " the most beautiful and best worth planting "
came from Virginia ; and it is the Americans who in modern times have brought the cultivation of walnuts to the finest art. They have chosen their trees with a careful eye to the virtues which fine walnuts should display—a proper size and weight, the kernels making nearly half the weight of the whole nut; in the nutshell, fine contours, a right thickness, good sealing qualities, and a light tan or silvery brown colouring; in the kernel, a good colour, a delicate skin, and a rich mild and sweet flavour. They often grow their favourite varieties—Franquette, Placentia, El Monte and the rest—in special orchards, whose owners concern themselves with no other harvest. They will sow between their trees in autumn cover crops, which they plough into the ground at the coming of spring. They will irri- gate their orchards, a week or two before the nuts are ripe, to a depth of six or eight feet; and thus they secure that the nuts, leaving their husks hanging on the trees, fall clean and ready for gathering by the Mexican families who come, as hop-picking families come to Kent, to bivouac in autumn among the walnut groves. They grade their nuts according to their sizes. They market them in branded packets to a population so fond of walnuts that, although the trees of Oregon and California were yielding well before the war some 5o,00o tons a year, nearly 30,000 further tons were being imported from Europe, Asia and South America to satisfy the national walnut hunger.
Some day, perhaps, in hope of creating the finest walnut in the world, the East Mailing Station will pass on to the slow process of breeding trees from the nut. There is a pretty story to encourage them of an American who in two successive autumns found a perfect black walnut floating down a stream, but never discovered the miraculous tree from which it had fallen. Meantime, we like to think of our youngsters as pioneers of a new British industry, and enjoy gathering about them the walnut lore of the countryside. A man high up in a neighbour's tree, beating its branches with a long pole, told me this last October that the finest nuts grew always on the outermost twigs. I remembered, as I watched him, that there is probably truth—for walnuts, if not for women—in the old saying about their improvement by beating. This rough pruning, the experts say, knocks off the terminal twigs, and lateral buds in the following spring produce two or three fruiting shoots in their places.
The full harvest of our little trees will be for other eyes than ours ; the enjoyment of their fine timber for yet other eyes again. May they yield abundant crops, and may their burrs be handsomely figured. This winter we hope only that those, who have gone from this house to serve in the air, on land, by sea and in the hospitals, will have enjoyed at Christmas the small, sweet walnuts of our old- fashioned tree. We wondered if thereafter they would play with their empty walnut shells the charming game a Russian guest taught us long ago. On New Year's Eve the Russians would paste round the inner rim of a basin emblems of various happenings—a pierced heart, it might be, for the coming of love ; a bag of gold for the winning of a fortune. They would fill the basin with water. Then each player in turn would stir the water and launch upon it a walnut shell with a burning taper for mast ; and where the circling tide brought the lighted ship to harbour, there would be found its owner's destiny in the coming year. If there be wartime candles small enough to light those diminutive shells, we like to think that the boys and girls, to whom our walnuts went travelling, set their little craft afloat this recent New Year's Eve. For never, surely, since walnuts came into the world, can hopes so poignant have awaited them in the havens where they would be.
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