usually with four external scales visible in two valvate pairs, the scales not lobed at the apex. Lateral buds, arising at an angle of 45°, small, globose, pubescent, with two to three scales visible externally; there are often two buds superposed, the lower one minute and embedded in the notch of the leaf-scar. The reddish-brown pubescent twigs and superposed pubescent lateral buds will distinguish this species from the common walnut.
Varieties and Hybrids
No varieties are known. The Black Walnut forms hybrids with the common walnut, which have been dealt with under the latter species. Burbank has raised a hybrid, which he calls "Royal," between J. nigra and J. californica.[1]
Juglans nigra x cinerea. A tree supposed to be this hybrid grew in the Botanic Garden at Marburg, and was described by Wender as Juglans cinerea-nigra in Linnæa, xxix. 728 (1857). (A.H.)
Distribution
According to Sargent the black walnut occurs in rich bottom lands and fertile hillsides, from western Massachusetts to southern Ontario, southern Michigan and Minnesota, central and northern Nebraska, eastern Kansas, and southward to western Florida, central Alabama, and Mississippi, and the valley of the San Antonio River, Texas; most abundant in the region west of the Alleghany Mountains, and of its largest size on the western slopes of the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, and on the fertile bottom lands of southern Illinois and Indiana, south-western Arkansas, and the Indian Territory.
The black walnut is not only one of the largest deciduous trees throughout a great part of the Middle States, but also one which, until it became too scarce, furnished a great part of the most valuable hardwood. It reached its maximum of size and abundance in the western foothills of the Southern Alleghany Mountains and in the rich, fertile alluvial river bottoms through which the great rivers of Ohio, Indiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky flow, and which were the first homes of the settlers who crossed the mountains towards the end of the eighteenth century, and for a quarter of a century carried on an unceasing warfare with the Indians. These pioneers also waged war against the forest whenever they could spare time, and for many years used the black walnut for fencing and for house-building, because it was an easy wood to split and to work; but they did not foresee that the trees which they destroyed would become one of the most valuable products of their farms, and would in a century be almost extinct as timber trees in many places where they were formerly the commonest.[2]
When I was travelling in the mountains of North Carolina in 1895, I saw but
