PlantFiles: Shagbark Hickory
Carya ovata

The buds of the Shagbark opening are always one of my favorite spring sights. They look like big green tulips with a touch of red.
I have transplanted many Shagbarks with good success.

These trees grow wild in the woods here. I love the tasty nuts but it is hard to get them before the squirrels empty the whole tree.

The Shagbarks nuts are easily cracked with a regular nutcracker. You still have to pick the nut out fairly similar to black walnuts, but it is well worth it. Their taste is awesome. I just used some in an apple salad I had made and it was great!

The nuts, largest of all hickory nuts, are sweet and edible.

The wood is hard, heavy, strong, and very flexible, making it a favored wood for tool handles. It is used in handles for tools and in athletic equipment. The wood also makes excellent firewood, and often is used in smoking meat.

It commonly is found in association with oak trees.

It is a slow-growing long-lived tree, hard to transplant because of its long taproot.

With it's beautiful golden Fall coloration, Shagbark Hickories grace our forests and roadways in this area. Their tall, straight trunks are easy to spot and they make such an impact on the landscape, that I love these trees.

The nuts are great for both wildlife and human consumption and there are many old time recipes that just won't taste right without 'Hikker Nuts' as they are called by the old folk.

The Shagbark Hickory is the most common and can be identified by the 5 leaflets that are on the main leaf stalk. The end leaflets are larger than the ones at the base of the leaflet.

The only similar tree is the Shellbark Hickory, and it is quite rare. The main difference is that Shellbarks have 7 to 9 leaflets on the main leaf.

I am 1/8 American Indian, probably Cherokee Tribe, and am interested in Southeastern Indian cooking. Here's a quote from the famous plant explorer of the Southeast USA, William Bartram, who reported "ancient cultivated fields" of hickory trees growing west of now Augusta, Georgia. There is some debate as to whether Bartram is speaking of shagbark or shellbark hickories due, of course, to botanists changing, and interchanging, names for these trees over time, but the shagbark is more common than the shellbark in the area of Georgia Bartram is writing about in 1792:

"Though these are natives of the forest, yet they thrive better, and are more fruitful, in cultivated plantations, and the fruit is in great estimation with the present generation of Indians . . . The Creeks store up (the nuts) in their towns. I have seen above a hundred bushels of these nuts belonging to one family. They pound them to pieces, and then cast them into boiling water, which, after passing through fine strainers, preserves the most oily part of the liquid; this they call by a name which signifies hiccory milk; it is as sweet and rich as fresh cream, and is an ingredient in most of their cookery, especially homony and corn cakes."

The Indians also crushed the nuts with the shells in water to make a drink; used the nut oil to bake pancakes; pounded the nuts into flour; and used the nut oil on their hair.

The earliest record of the use of Carya species, which includes pecans, by humans comes from caves in Texas with strata that dates to 6100 BC. The nuts were used in trade, as their use far exceeded their growing range.

I have quite a few hickory trees growing on my property in Northcentral Florida, zone 8b, and some are quite large, approaching 80 feet tall or more, but unfortunately they are either mockernuts (C. tomentosa) or pignuts (C. glabra), not the more edible shagbarks (C. ovata), or the most esteemed shellbarks (C. laciniosa). Also the nuts have some kind of bug, probably weevils, and the squirrels destroy lots of them.

"Mocker" means hammer in Dutch, and a hammer is needed to crack the shell. Pignuts are small and often bitter. Shagbark often has a low yield, but the taste is sweet like pecans. Shellbark is "the lowland counterpart of the shagbark" with larger fruit, and it is considered the best of the hickories. The outer husk of hickory nuts is fleshy and green at first, but eventually dries to a dark brown and splits into sections, revealing a walnut type nut. The nuts keep in their shells for a year or two.

The smooth white seed of Carya ovata is often cited as the sweetest of the Hickory nuts. Like all Carya species, the wood is prized for its durability.

The seventh president of the U.S., Andrew Jackson was dubbed "Old Hickory" because of his toughness. Six Shagbark Hickories were planted by his grave, located at The Hermitage his historic home in Tennessee. During a recent visit, I didn't see the hickories, but over 1,000 trees on the property have been lost in recent years during severe storms.