Page:TheTreesOfGreatBritainAndIreland vol02B.djvu/132

274 butternut, which gives a fawn colour. The young half-grown nuts make excellent pickles if gathered early in June, but the ripe nuts, though eaten by boys and Indians, are oily and soon become acrid.

According to L.B. Case, who wrote an interesting article on this tree, if an incision is made in the trunk early in spring before the unfolding of the leaves, it yields a rich saccharine sap, nearly if not quite equal to that obtained from the sugar maple. The medicinal uses of the bark are fully explained in Bentley and Trimen's work cited above.

The typical form, with small leaflets, which has been introduced into cultivation in Europe, is a shrub or small tree; bark of young trunks smooth, pale, whitish, becoming in older trees deeply furrowed and scaly. Leaflets, seven to fifteen or more, small, one to three inches long, sub-sessile, ovate or lanceolate, never oblong, apex acuminate, base rounded and unequal-sided, crenulate-serrate and non-ciliate in margin; upper surface with scattered minute pubescence; lower surface green with scattered minute brown hairs and axil tufts. Rachis with numerous sessile yellow glands and glandular hairs. Young shoots with numerous sessile yellow glands, interspersed with glandular hairs and obcordate leaf-scars, which are notched above. Older shoots shortly pubescent.

Flowers: staminate, catkins slender, two to four inches long, scales three- to five-lobed, with ovate-lanceolate tomentose bracts; stamens twenty. Pistillate flowers few in a spike, tomentose, involucre irregularly divided into a laciniate border, slightly shorter than the ovate acute calyx-lobes.

Fruit: globose or rarely oblong, very variable in size, ½ to 1½ inch in diameter; husk glabrate or coated with rufous hairs; nut globose without ridges, often compressed at the ends, dark brown or black, grooved with longitudinal simple or forked grooves, four-celled at the base, two-celled at the apex.

Var. major, Torrey, Sitgreave's Report, 171, t. 16 (1853): usually a tree, attaining 50 feet in height with a trunk 15 feet in girth. In this form the leaflets are large, reaching 6 inches in length; the fruit is also larger. It would appear that this variety is the western form, the typical form being characteristic of the eastern part of the area of distribution of the species.