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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.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 3–7
- Soil
- Loam
- Moisture
- Well-Drained · Moderate
Vertical layer
Canopy- Soil pH
- 6–8
- Plant type
- Deciduous Tree
- Mature height
- 40–60 ft
- Mature spread
- 40–60 ft
- Plant spacing
- 24–60 ft
- Root type
- Tap
- Spread pattern
- Seed
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The deeper layer
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- Primary
- Locked ecological function
- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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