A Story About Butternuts

A STORY ABOUT BUTTERNUTS

Wednesday, December 05, 2007 (Napanee Beaver)

Friday, December 07, 2007 (Picton Gazette)

I continue to be amazed at how vividly I can remember some isolated event that took place more than 50 years ago, but cannot always instantly remember the names of those persons I meet on the street. A case in point was a week ago Monday when I checked into some statistics as I was downloading the weather on my computer. I always like to peruse record values for the day to see how our weather patterns have changed and discovered that on that same day, in 1956, we had 32 centimetres of snow, and according to subsequent daily checks of this web page, it did not melt. In Imperial speak, that is just over a foot of snow, a fair accumulation for even the latter part of November. I’m not quite sure why I remember that day so clearly; perhaps it was because my father was in the hospital for an operation, suddenly thrusting the responsibility of the farm on the shoulders of my mother and my older brother. Certainly there were other snowfalls and similar experiences that have become lost through the passage of time.

We started that morning by looking for a dozen or so calves that were still out on pasture. I was 11 years of age, going on 12, and while I remember the snow as much deeper, I guess, in reality, it was only a foot deep since I wasn’t too many inches tall myself. We found the calves near a spring on the property and could only suppose that the calves reasoned if they were going to die, they weren’t leaving this world thirsty. The spring flowed freely 12 months of the year and was one of my favourite spots to relax as this oasis was bordered by a fencerow of red cedars, accented by a butternut tree that grew a short distance from the fence. The calves looked miserable, their backs hunched as they grouped around this butternut, seeking what shelter they could from the few leafless branches above them.

I still visit that spring now and again which still flows freely. Remnants of the fence are still present, the cedars are much larger, but the butternut tree is gone. We had others along the fencerows, and one in the middle of a field behind our house, but are but memories now, all victims of butternut canker. Much the same as a few beech trees here have managed to survive the current outbreak in the Quinte area of beech bark scale, Nature has attempted to ensure the survival of the butternut by making a few individuals resistant to any disease outbreak. I came upon one such survivor earlier this fall, while conducting a guided hike in a demonstration woodlot at the International Plowing Match, at Crosby. The tree was enormous, reaching high into the sky for at least 25 metres – that’s 80 feet for us metrically challenged folks from the old school. No one in my group that day had ever tasted the nut meat fresh from a butternut, and with good reason probably. Conventional nut crackers won’t make a dent on their tough shell. Only a workshop bench vice will break the will of a tough butternut shell, but the effort is worth it. We never had any tree on our farm grow that tall, never mind the butternuts which barely reached half that height. I realized later that it had a lot to do with soil depth, and am still amazed at enormous specimens of butternut, shagbark hickory, and other species that I have come across, once I started exploring beyond the shallow soils of our old farm at Big Island!

I knew a few years ago that butternuts were disappearing but was unclear as to the reason. My first introduction to butternut canker was at Vanderwater Conservation Area at Thomasburg when a forester pointed out the tell tale signs of the disease. Oozing from a crack in the trunk was a black inky fluid. The canker is actually a fungus that was first reported in Wisconsin some 40 years ago, but seems to have only recently become a concern in Ontario; so much so, that the tree is now listed as an endangered species by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Species in Canada (COSEWIC) and has been adopted onto the Endangered Species List by the Canadian Wildlife Service. Infection usually occurs in the lower crown of the tree, then spreads downward as fungal spores from the bleeding cankers are washed by rain along the branches and down the main trunk.

A goal of the National Recovery Strategy, is to find genetic resistence to the fungus. In the meantime, those fortunate enough to still have live butternut trees on their property are being encouraged to maintain their healthy trees. This will ensure plenty of seed for the next generation of butternut trees and lessen the risk of potentially resistant butternut being cut down or destroyed. Makes me think that I should have hung onto that butternut coffee table I built in woodworking class at high school, and all those collected butternuts we eventually discarded !

It seems ironic that the very tree under which our calves attempted to save themselves from a sudden snow storm, would itself die some years later.