Plant · P-535

Butternut Walnut

Juglans cinerea

Butternut is a deciduous North American native walnut grown for its oily, sweet kernel, though the nut is fiddly to crack and only about a fifth of the shell's weight is meat. It also gives a sweet spring sap that can be boiled into syrup, three dyes that need no mordant, and a light, easily worked cabinet wood. It is short-lived for a hardwood and increasingly hard to keep alive at all - a canker disease called butternut blight eventually kills most untreated trees, so planting one means sourcing canker-resistant stock and treating it as a medium-term planting rather than a legacy tree.