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The hickories are a third walnut relative, deliciously flavorful. Their rinds split off handily in sections, but the meat in their dense, tight shells is almost impossible to pick out whole. The shagbark fruit is bigger than the smoothbark, which is deprecated as pignut. As shade trees, native hickories deserve ground-space for their rugged sym- metry, but they are not worth buying or cultivating. Only squirrels, and epicures of utmost patience, truly enjoy hickory nuts. Pecans are one more member of the walnut family, indigenous from lower Indiana to Mexico. In Texas they grow as forests. Pecans have been extensively refined and cultivated throughout the South, where they are an important money crop. Long-lived and vigorous, pecans want rich soil and lots of growing room—sixty feet between trees. |
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