Hickory

Hickories make up the genus Carya of the walnut family, Juglandaceae: nineteen species accepted by Plants of the World Online, seven native to China, Indochina and Assam and twelve to North America. Most are deciduous forest trees with pinnately compound leaves, small yellow-green catkins in spring, and large nuts held in a husk that splits into four at maturity. The English name was clipped from an Algonquian word, perhaps Powhatan, such as pocohicora, which may have named the nut or a milky drink made from it, while Carya comes from the Greek for a nut. The nuts have fed the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands of North America since the middle Archaic period, and the hard, tough wood goes into tool handles, bows, drumsticks and walking sticks and is a favourite for smoking meat. Kynes gathers American folk magic around the tree. A piece of hickory driven into the doorframe kept a husband from straying, and a lock of a wandering lover's hair wound round a piece of it was meant to bring them home. In nineteenth-century Pennsylvania a churn whose milk had been bewitched was thrashed with a hickory stick, which was believed to leave marks on the witch to blame, and in Seneca legend the dead came back to life once their bones were laid beside a great hickory. Cunningham gives a single use, against trouble with the law: the root burnt to ash, mixed with cinquefoil and boxed above the door.