folklore and ancient usage 1 - walnuts

I've just been working on an article for the Sunday Times about the four nuts that the UK can just about do - filberts/cobs, walnuts, chestnuts and almonds. I thought you might like to read the section on walnuts from my book 'The Kitchen Garden'. Here it is:

Walnut
Juglans regia LINNAEU
Origin: central Asia
Not really a plant of the kitchen garden proper, as it is an imposing tree, and one which does not take kindly to pruning. However, because of the value of both its fruit and its timber, it was widely planted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,and because its deep roots do not take much nourishment fromthe upper layers of the soil, it was commonly to be found in the shelter belts that surrounded the better planned kitchen# garden.

The species normally grown (there are many edible species of Juglans, a few known in Britain since 1629) is native to the area between the Carpathians and northern India. The Greeks found it in Persia, and from their gardens Vitellius took it to Italy during the reign of Tiberius. It was certainly in England by 1562, but it is difficult to imagine that a plant so important to Roman medicine was not introduced during their occupation. It was already quite common by Gerard's time, so if it was not brought in by the Romans, it may have been introduced during the fifteenth century. Certainly its beautiful timber became popular for furniture and wainscot only in the seventeenth century (the wood is wormproof), by which time ancient trees must have been sufficiently plentiful to supply the market.

As usual, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century usage followed Roman ideas. The nuts were used at the beginning of meals as a vermifuge (walnuts were originally pickled so that worms could be expelled throughout the year) and as a counter-poison (Gerard believed them effective). They were also used to suppress onion-scented belches, and by I714 walnuts were being used as a sauce for fish, as well as cold meats.

Because the kernel of the nut looks so much like a brain, it is not surprising that nuts or bits of the root were hung around the neck to cure epilepsy, frenzy,'Passions of the Brain' and other mental disorders. Powdered walnut root also 'provoketh Urine, and purgeth the liver and the kidneys. Being boiled in wine and drunk, it purgeth the Blood, and is good for women in child-bed, to purge their Seconds and Termes ... it helpeth the grippings of the Belly, helpeth the Cholick, cleaneth the Guts ... defendeth against the Strangury, the biting of Serpents, and the spleen; and having Castoreum boiled with it, it helpeth the palsie and the stone.

The leaves, too, were useful. Macerated, they were often part of various insecticides and were commonly used to kill off worms in bowling-greens and lawns - the worms were then suitable for use by anglers - as well as ringworm on human scalps (though, mixed with boar fat, they were also a useful hair-restorer).

Decoctions of the leaf were used to dry up running ulcers and sores, while dried leaves were placed among clothes in the press to stop the depredations of moths. Extracts from the green nut shells were used to stop toothache, and from the ripe shells to give a deep yellow dye. For reasons which I cannot discover, the green nuts were preserved, keeping the purity of their colour by storing in the pressings of crab apple after their verjuice had been pressed out.

The oil from ripe nuts was of enormous importance, as a frying#and cooking oil (marvellous, too, if you can find it), as a base for paints and varnishes, and in oil lamps. The wood, however worm-proof, was too fragile for structural timbers and so was used for the finest items of furniture and panelling and for the bodies and wheels of coaches.

To have a kitchen garden ringed by walnuts was not, however, without its dangers; it was not thought safe to sit beneath them without a hat, as the trees' effluvia were hurtful. Perhaps, though, the hat was necessary as an ancient mark of respect for a tree sacred to Jupiter. Even so, as late as the nineteenth century, walnuts were not planted near houses or near strawberry beds.

There, how can you not grow them? Read all about it in the Sunday Times, Feb 22. When the article is out, i'll put a link on my web index page.