Carya ovata

Carya ovata, the shagbark hickory, is one of the great native trees of the eastern woods, as easy to know by the bark as by the nuts. Mature trunks shed long, gray plates that curl away at the ends and hang loose, giving the tree a genuinely shaggy silhouette against a winter sky. Beneath that ragged coat stands a tall, straight, long-lived hardwood that can shade a landscape for two centuries and more.

The nuts are the other glory, sweet and rich and widely counted among the finest of all the hickories. That food value runs deep in the land's history, for the word hickory itself comes from the Virginia Algonquian pawcohiccora, a nourishing milk pounded from the nuts, and the crop still feeds squirrels, chipmunks, turkeys, and bears through the fall. A shagbark begins bearing slowly, then rewards generations, with the best years coming to trees well over half a century old.

Shagbark hickory belongs to the walnut family, kin to the pecan and the walnuts, and like them casts a little juglone into the soil, though far more gently than a black walnut. The pinnately compound leaves turn a warm golden brown in fall and release a clean, spicy scent when crushed, and the tree stands among the most valuable of native hosts, feeding the caterpillars of the luna moth and the great hickory horned devil. The hard, shock-resistant wood has long gone into tool handles and, famously, the smoke that flavors hickory-smoked meats.

Give Carya ovata full sun and room, on moist, well-drained soil, and plant while the tree is young, since a deep taproot makes an older hickory very hard to move. This is a tree for the long view, a canopy shade tree for a large lawn, a woodland, or a wildlife planting where the nuts and autumn gold can be enjoyed for lifetimes. For a gardener planting for the future, few native trees give more than a shagbark hickory.