One doesn’t expect to outlive a tree. Our clocks tick at a different pace. Yet it happens, and sometimes it’s almost like a death in the family. The old shagbark hickory beside our driveway is that kind of tree. It looks better now than when we bought the place 35 years ago. It looked terrible then. It was open at the bottom, hollow all the way up and surrounded by long, thick strips of steel gray bark shed from its trunk. Shagbark hickories shed their bark, we’re told, to help foil fungi and insect predators.
The hollow hickory was a hotel tree, home over the years to countless residents and guests: family after family of gray squirrels, the odd raccoon or possum, the nests of robins, bluejays and nuthatches. One spring, four baby squirrel heads poked out of one knothole to see what manner of creature was creating the racket below. A pileated woodpecker, the avian version of a muscle car, stopped when in the neighborhood and, revving up its beak, hammered away at one of New England’s toughest woods. It kept the tree free of carpenter ants, which ate the rafters of my shed instead.
Despite its obvious infirmities, the tree regularly produced a large crop of golf ball-sized nuts. The green husks split away in four or five equal wedges to reveal an oblong blonde nut that can almost never be cracked to retrieve a whole half nutmeat.
Some years I raced critters to them and got, not enough to squirrel away for winter, but enough to make a batch of hickory nut brownies. They are sweet, delicious and nutritious. Native Americans stored the nuts in their shells in the cold, then cracked and boiled them without removing the meats to make hickory milk to drink or use to cook a sort of porridge. I use the fallen branches as firewood or in the smoker to flavor ham, pork loins or turkeys.
Hickory is not just tough, long used to make ax and pick handles, but it has serious firepower, the highest BTU value of any of New England’s hardwoods. We all love that beat-up old giving tree, which every day says “Survive, turn your face to the sky, welcome visitors.”
Before the woodcutters arrived I put my forehead against the tree to say an anthropomorphic goodbye but got no warm and fuzzy response. Instead, the tough old tree seemed to say, “Suck it up dude, we all gotta go sometime.”
Shagbarks are monoecious, which means the tree produces both male and female flowers. The tree, I’m pretty sure, has offspring, two 40-foot kids on the tree line, a smaller one outside our bedroom window. Squirrels, it turns out, sometimes forget. The hickories will join the new walnut, a four-foot sapling when planted that’s now 50 feet tall. It’s a great something-or-other of the walnut tree at Mount Vernon, George Washington’s home. It was grown from a nut from the walnut tree on the State House’s back lawn. A bronze plaque at the foot of that tree informs the curious that it was planted by the Boy Scouts in 1939. A tree with a pedigree.
Research pioneered by scientist Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia found that trees share resources via their root systems and the vast fungal network underfoot that’s called “the wood-wide web.” First dibs goes to relatives, followed by neighbors of other species. The sharing speeds up when an old tree senses its impending death.
The tree guy says the hickory’s fall is imminent and it could kill someone walking up the driveway. I told the old hickory that the chainsaws are coming. I think its busy sharing its sugar now, still giving, always giving. God how we’ll miss that tree.