England. The process of budding or grafting them is fully described by Loudon, p. 1431, and need not be repeated here.
If, however, walnuts are to be planted for timber or ornament, it is far better to raise them from nuts, which may be sown as soon as they are ripe, if they can be protected from mice and vermin; or kept in sand until February, when they should be sown two to three inches deep in rich light soil, which will encourage the production of fibrous roots at an early period. As the large strong tap-root makes the tree difficult to transplant, it should be undercut with a spade about six inches below the soil in the first year, or the nut may be allowed to germinate before sowing and the end of the root pinched off. If this is not done they must be carefully transplanted in March, and protected from late spring frost as much as possible until they have made stems four to six feet high. For though the walnut is one of the latest trees to come into leaf, none is more tender as regards spring frost, and as it does not bear pruning well and has a natural tendency to form branches rather than a clean stem, it is important that the trees should be carefully trained when young.
It is now much less planted than formerly, and the wood is not so much valued by country timber merchants as it ought to be, but there is no reason why it should not be treated as a forest tree on suitable soils, and drawn up among other trees with the object of growing clean timber; though I consider it inferior to the black walnut in this respect. It is evidently a lover of a warm soil and climate, and though on good limestone soil or deep loam resting on chalk it grows fast and to a great size, it should not be planted on heavy clay, on poor sand, or in exposed windy situations.
The walnut is very seldom blown down on account of its strong roots, and I have never seen one struck by lightning. It does not reach a very great age; so far as I know, 200 years is about the limit of its life, and many trees become hollow or decayed before attaining as much as this.
The only place where I have seen walnuts self-sown in England is at Holkham, where, in the Triangle plantation, are several trees, one 17 feet high, in a fairly thick plantation of larch and Scots pine on light sandy soil. They are 100 to 150 yards distant from the parent tree, the nuts having probably been carried by squirrels or rooks. On the sandhills at the same place I saw a self-sown tree five to six feet high, and on the roadside near Colesborne a young tree has sprung up from a nut dropped by a passer-by.
Mr. E. Kay Robinson[1] mentions the occurrence of young walnut trees amidst clumps of other large trees, due to the carrying away by rooks of the fruit from an old walnut tree in a garden near by. He has kindly sent us a photograph of a walnut tree growing in a field at Warham, near Wells, Norfolk, which had evidently been deposited by a rook, as the young tree in its growth had thrust up the roots of an old willow tree, amongst which it had grown.
- ↑ Garden, xvi. 412 (1904),
