The shagbark hickory’s “hard sinewy limbs and rude, shaggy coat” are like “the pioneer himself in fringed deerskin hunting shirt.”

By Constance Casey

 One of the grandest North American trees is the shagbark hickory. It’s dramatic and easy to identify, with its smoke-gray bark warping away from the trunk. Grand, of course, implies big, and that’s part of the reason why the shagbark is not often planted and you wouldn’t see it in a nursery. It spreads itself in the woods from Quebec to Minnesota, south to Georgia and Texas, typically topping out at 70 to 90 feet with an irregular oval crown. It can grow to more than 100 feet, given 350 years or so.

The copper beech, with satiny bark, is British or Continental—Old World. The shagbark, to the essayist Donald Culross Peattie, is New World. “To everyone with a feeling for things American, and for American history, the shagbark seems like a symbol of the pioneer age,” he writes, “with its hard sinewy limbs and rude, shaggy coat, like the pioneer himself in fringed deerskin hunting shirt.”

Peattie was born in 1898 and died in 1964, and his masterpiece, written in the late 1940s, is A Natural History of Trees. It has two parts—one on Eastern and Central North America, the other on trees of the West—and it covers hundreds of species. He was a botanist and is accurate and complete, but these are also wonderful portraits. Part of what makes the book such a pleasure is his attention to the effect that a tree has on the people looking at it or sitting under it.

There are a dozen hickory species native to North America, but the shagbark (Carya ovata) is obviously his favorite. The usual textbook description tells us the tree has compound leaves, with a five-fingered look. Peattie correctly observes that winter and early spring are the shagbark’s best seasons. Its female flowers in April, with male catkins, are noted and praised, and the tree is said to have impressive fall foliage. Wrong. Those flowers and catkins are barely visible. The allegedly good fall display is a dull yellow-brown and the leaves are often speckled brown. Some years the leaves turn a sullen brown and drop off early in September.

In its barer seasons, the plates of bark, more than a foot long, about six inches wide, and curling at both ends, seem interestingly warped. (They’re attached at the middle, and it would be hard to pull them off.) There are loads of trees with exfoliating bark, but few or none with these big segments.

What is most impressive, and rarely mentioned in contemporary tree books, is the shagbark’s emerging foliage: “But about the first week in April the inner bud scales begin to open, arching out and twisting at the same time, but with their tips at first still adhering in a pointed arch. Shining and downy on the inner surface, and yellow-green richly tinged with red, they look like petals of some great tulip or magnolia as finally they part and curl back. The young leaves and catkins are then seen standing up in a twist, like a skein of green wool.” Peattie, whose works are being reissued, studied French poetry his first two years at college before turning to botany. He has a sort of romance with this tree (and others); his language is affectionate and sensuous.

The shagbark is one of those trees, like an ancient weeping cherry, with flowers or tender foliage shown to advantage against textured, aged-looking bark. The shagbark’s nuts were important food for Native Americans. They’re tasty, though small. The thick green four-sectioned husk turns dark, splits, and drops in the fall, when it’s food for game birds such as wood ducks and turkeys.

Pig farmers are the people who intentionally plant a shagbark. The nuts are part of the mast that pigs favor. Thinking of the famous hickory-smoked ham, there’s a connection—pigs that grew fat on hickory nuts have their meat cured over a hickory wood fire.

And, of course, there’s Andrew Jackson, known as Old Hickory. In 1830, he planned his tomb (he would die in 1845), placing six shagbarks around it. 

Constance Casey, a former New York City Parks Department gardener, writes on natural history for Bloomberg News and Slate, as well as LAM.