I often think back to the time when butternut trees were robust members of the tree community, before butternut canker swept across the tree’s range, infecting nearly every specimen. The spread of this disease is a true horror story, and it’s hard not to get as morose as the trees look. Butternut trees don’t die very willingly; hopeless tufts of leaves burst from the trunk after the branches have died; later the leafless, gaunt, peeling, rot-resistant skeletons stand accusingly for years.
Even the name of butternut canker, Sirococcus clavigignenti-juglandacearum, sounds poisonous and mysterious and, indeed, no one knows where the canker came from or how it got here. Though it is hard to know how it could have been prevented, this deadly affliction is a poignant reminder that we need to take good care of trees whenever we can.
New England is at the northeastern edge of the butternut’s range, and it was never very common here. Indeed, it does not grow in pure stands anywhere. It needs nearly full sun to become established and continues to need plenty of light until it reaches the canopy. After adolescence, it will survive with light only from above.
The wood, often called white walnut, is a favorite of cabinetmakers. Like black walnut, it doesn’t warp or crack, is lightweight, and is easily worked. The wood’s lustrous, satiny surface makes it ideal for paneling, and it was extensively used in earlier times.
The future of butternut seems bleaker with every passing year. Will this year, next year, or the year after be the last year that butternut persists as a recognizable part of the forest community? Probably some butternut trees will survive, and some luckier individuals for many years, but overall the outlook is so poor, the evidence of decline and death so arresting everywhere, that I’d rather look back than ahead.
I didn’t grow up knowing about trees, and my introduction to butternut was through its nut.
Someone I knew had sawn a nut into thin cross-sections on a band saw, and the intricate and deeply sculptured/furrowed slices were intriguing. The pieces looked like delicate and beautiful lacework, but instead of being flimsy fabric, they were made of a strong, dense, hard material – as hard as the wood is soft. This made it understandable later when I was kept awake by the gnawing of two shifts of rodents – flying squirrels at night and red squirrels at dawn – working on some butternuts in the attic. Those gnawing sounds were so intense and long lasting that, however buttery the nut, it didn’t seem possible that there could be as many calories inside as those expended in getting there.
Another auditory feature was the random report of artillery as the yard trees that towered over the house shed green butternuts onto the standing-seam roof. Butternuts make beautiful yard trees. Leafing out late, and dropping their leaves early, they provide shade only when needed, a beautiful dappled shade, perfect for this climate. The long leaves, sometimes with as many as 17 leaflets, and the wide-spreading, stout branches contribute to its interesting, slightly prehistoric look.
Sometimes butternuts are shaped like other trees, tall and narrow-crowned. Other times, even in the forest, a butternut tree can look like a yard tree. A toxin, called juglone, produced by the roots of both butternut and black walnut trees, can stunt or kill competing trees. When this happens, a butternut will spread its branches as widely as it wants, so wide, in fact, that its thin shade permits a circular grassy patch to grow in the middle of the woods. To find one of these grassy patches, you just have to follow the sound of red squirrel gibberish.
Like many people, I have planted dozens of butternuts in the vegetable garden over the years, moving them out to the yard when they were a year or two old. Those that survived the sometimes careless lawnmower grew vigorously. In fact within a few years, they could avenge the deaths of their brethren that had been mowed by using their low, wide-spreading branches to attack anyone with a lawnmower who came too close.
It is that vigor that I wish for in the butternuts I find in the woods. On the theory that where there is life, there is hope, I keep an eye out for butternut seedlings and saplings. There are not many of them, so it doesn’t take much effort to give them a hand by bending and breaking the tops of nearby little trees that might overshadow the young butternuts: perhaps one of them could be the sole member of its species to be immune to the scourge.