At Walsingham Abbey, Norfolk, the seat of H. Lee Warner, Esq., there was a specimen figured in Grigor's Eastern Arboretum, p. 300, as a tree clothed to the ground with foliage, and of which the spreading branches were propped up. In 1840 it was 8 feet in girth, with a spread of branches 165 feet in circumference, but is now much decayed.
At Brightwell Park, Oxon, the property of R. Lowndes Norton, Esq., there are three or four well-grown trees about 50 years old, the largest of which measures 68 feet by 5 feet 10 inches, and bears fruit abundantly. The leaves of these trees were conspicuous by their yellow colour in the first week of October.
At all the four last-named places these trees have been known as hickories, and it is probable that others of the so-called hickories in England are really black walnuts.
Two trees[1] growing close together at The Firs, Manor Lane, London, S.E., both measured, in 1886, 10 feet 9 inches at 4 feet above the ground, and were estimated to be 90 feet high. They were then in excellent health, and bore good crops of nuts, which, however, were rarely perfectly developed.
Many other trees no doubt exist in old places south of the Thames; but we have never seen or heard of any large ones in the midland or western counties. Sir Charles Strickland, however, tells us that the black walnut is quite hardy in Yorkshire; and that he has trees at Hildenley, 15 to 20 feet high and ripening seed, whilst at Housham, another place of his in the same county, they thrive even better in the woods, where they look like becoming fine timber trees.
In Ireland, the largest tree seen by Henry is at Ballykilcavan, Queen's County: it measured in 1907, 68 feet high by 9½ feet in girth. We know of no trees of any size in Scotland.
The largest which we have heard of in Europe is a tree growing at Schloss Dyck, the seat of Fürst Salm-Dyck in Germany, which was planted in 1809, and in 1904 measured 35 metres high by 3.58 metres in girth, with a crown diameter of 35 metres.
Timber
It is very strange that though this timber has been imported on a large scale from North America for many years, both to England and the Continent, where it commands a very high price, its value is quite unknown to the English country timber merchant, and none of the writers on wood seem to know much about it. Even Marshall Ward, in his edition of Laslett (1894), says (p. 181) that it will not bear comparison with the quality of either Black Sea or Italian walnut wood. Boulger, in Wood (p. 339), says that it is "more uniform in colour, darker, less liable to insect attack, and thus more durable than European walnut." Stone says (p. 211), "This wood is readily confused with J. regia."
I can only say that I have seen four different trees felled in England, of which the wood was perfectly distinct by its purplish colour from that of any European walnut; and though I have not been able to get any definite proof of the truth of
- ↑ Gard. Chron. 1886, xxvi. 616, fig, 120.
