Spirit Trees: The Black Walnut?

A long time ago a girlfriend of mine lived in Arizona and seriously collected pieces of Navaho and Hopi jewelry. She once gave me a Hopi inlaid silver ornament shaped as a snake and claimed that the snake was my spirit animal. Perhaps sensing my confusion or doubt, she explained that to the Hopi, snakes symbolized an umbilical cord that linked all humans to Mother Earth. The snake also signified, according to her, my personal characteristics of persistence, tenacity, or stubbornness.

Any Native American blood in my family was four or five generations back and from the Creek nation in Georgia, rather than from the Southwestern tribes. I also don’t really identify spiritually or otherwise with particular animals. If I feel strongly linked or have an intuitive connection with anything in the natural world, it’s with a unique tree found here in Louisiana and elsewhere.

Growing up with many country cousins, we had several family rituals involving trees in my grandparents’ yard or in its surrounding woods. Thanksgiving visits usually included an hour or so of our gathering pecans from an ancient tree in the pasture area. During the Easter holiday, my father and an uncle or two would occasionally lead a group of youngsters in a search of the nearby woods for sassafras trees. We would dig around the base of one of those trees for roots to cut and later use for making sassafras tea. The pecan, sassafras, hickory, or oak trees in that area, though, never evoked my greater sense of wonder and regard.      

I remember my father’s fascination with a large black walnut tree that grew on the Winn Parish rural property where his maternal grandfather had settled and built a log cabin in the 1870s. My father inherited the property and restored the large cabin on it in the 1960s and ‘70s. The black walnut tree stood at the periphery of the clearing around that heart-of-pine, dog-trot cabin. This tree’s shape resembled something like a live oak tree with a couple of huge, twisting lower branches running at least 30 feet away from the trunk and only ten feet or less above the ground. My father had stressed how valuable black walnut trees were and that sometimes people even trespassed, felled, and stole these trees.   

Someone in our family had long ago hung a cable swing from the largest of this black walnut tree’s lower branches. By about 1988, the old tree began to lose some higher branches and to show its age. My father worried that a child might try to use the swing and that the branch supporting the swing might fall. So, he was determined one October day to remove that large branch. Trying to use a ladder, a chain saw, and a come-along by himself, he had an accident, fell off the ladder, and suffered a serious head concussion.

More than a decade after his death in 1995, I decided to contact a heritage tree logger from south Louisiana to spend a few days harvesting that black walnut tree while it still had some value. The logger claimed from tree ring inspection that it was well over 100 years old. From the base and roots of the tree, he cut blanks that I contracted with two wood turners to create a large bowl and smaller jewelry boxes to give to family members. Lumber from the tree quickly was snapped up by several furniture-making hobbyists.   

I thought the late fall days of my gathering, separating nuts from their enveloping drupes, and then shelling the nuts were over – not that I really would miss the hours demanded for these tasks. Removing the nuts from their drupes was messy work. The oily chemical combination of juglone and tannin in the drupes could filter through light gloves and leave black stains on my hands that took weeks to disappear. I didn’t simply discard the black slush left from the broken drupes though. Anything that produced such a formidable stain, when mixed with a little water, seemed worthy of addition to store-bought wood stain for later use on fences and decks.

Effectively shelling different kinds of nuts is a skill that probably fewer folks master today compared to decades ago. A lot of people now conveniently purchase already shelled nuts. Black walnuts seem one of the more difficult and time-consuming nuts to shell. Often you end up digging for small pieces from the convoluted chambers of the nut. This effort might be worth it, though, since black walnuts are reportedly as nutritious as any type of nut. They provide protein, fiber, heart-healthy monounsaturated fat, omega-3 fatty acids, potassium, phosphorus, and Vitamin B5 and B6. They are also loaded with polyphenols that have antioxidant properties.

A year or two after having the old black walnut tree harvested, I noticed a few green drupes about 60 feet from where the huge tree had stood. Closer inspection of the area proved the existence of a young tree that was just beginning to bear fruit. Each fall since, I’ve been gifted with the presence of at least a small crop of black walnuts. I could ignore those drupes on the ground and leave them to rot or for possible squirrel consumption, but some indefinable force just won’t let me do that. I feel strangely compelled to put in the hours of work and frustrations processing those tough nuts. 

P.S. – Cashews, pistachios, and several other common “nuts” are not considered nuts by purists. Botanically, a nut is a dry fruit that consists of a hard shell covering a single seed, such as found in acorns, chestnuts, and hazelnuts. Drupes are fruits, like peaches and cherries, which are fleshy on the outside and contain a shell covering a seed on the inside. We consume the fleshy exterior of drupes like peaches, while we consume the seeds of drupes like cashews.