#walnut trees

Explore the symbolic world of medieval trees—sacred lindens, deadly yews, and feared walnuts—in faith, folklore, and daily life.

A recent study has pinpointed a gene module crucial for enhancing walnut trees' resistance to anthracnose, a widespread fungal disease threatening the walnut industry. The research reveals how the JrPHL8-JrWRKY4-JrSTH2L module regulates disease defense, opening up new opportunities for breeding resistant walnut varieties and promoting sustainable cultivation practices. Anthracnose, caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides, poses a significant threat to walnut production, causing severe losses in yield and quality. Traditional control methods are limited, and environmental concerns drive the need for alternative strategies. Transcription factors like WRKYs and MYBs are key in plant immunity, yet the molecular mechanisms behind walnut resistance to anthracnose have remained largely unexplored. Given these challenges, an in-depth study of the molecular pathways in walnut defense is essential.

Excerpt from this story from Earth Island Journal:

KOCHKOR KALDARBAEV REMEMBERS the forest of his childhood. It’s dense, with thickets of tall grass and brambles that make walking in a straight line impossible. Trees come in all shapes and sizes: spindly youngsters, stately elders, tiny seedlings peeking up through the forest floor. They come in all varieties, too, from hawthorn and maple to fruit-bearing trees like apple, pistachio, and plum. And everywhere you look, there’s the walnut: wide, smooth trunks branching off into bushy green canopies, with clusters of round fruits waiting to be cracked open to get at the creamy nut inside.

Kaldarbaev was born and raised in the village of Arslanbob in the mountains of southern Kyrgyzstan, a Central Asian nation home to the world’s largest natural-growth walnut forest. Today the forest covers some 50 square miles of a fertile valley of the Tian Shan Mountain range, which stretches from Uzbekistan in the west to China and Mongolia in the east.

His father spent 40 years working for the then-Soviet government as a forestry officer tasked with keeping the forest healthy and managing how people used it — which then, as now, mostly involved harvesting walnuts, the region’s main source of income and a key ingredient of the local culture and traditions.

For centuries, every fall, the residents of Arslanbob and other villages dotting these mountains have left their homes and camped out in the dense forest, spending weeks shaking down the ripe nuts from the trees and collecting them by hand. Usually, this is an all-hands-on-deck job for entire families, including children. During harvest season, the walnuts make their way from local markets in the nearby city of Jalal-Abad to Europe and Asia, mostly along trade routes that once comprised the Silk Road.

But by 2012, Kaldarbaev could walk through the forest understory with relative ease. The thick undergrowth was mostly gone, as were the smaller, more immature trees, says the 51-year-old who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a government forester. Only the tall trunks of mature walnuts remained standing, spaced oddly far apart.

A similar fate afflicts much of Kyrgyzstan’s forests, which make up only about 6.2 percent of the country’s land area but are rich in biodiversity. Between 2001 and 2022, the mountainous nation lost 2,470 hectares (6,100 acres) of forest cover, mainly to deforestation, overgrazing, and desertification. In recent years, climate change and development have added to the pressures facing these forests, putting rare species like Malus niedzwetzkyana, or Niedzwetzky’s apple, and Pyrus korshinskyi, or Kazak plum, and Arslanbob’s iconic walnuts at risk.

MisAdventures with a Black Walnut

I stepped on something during my after work walk the other day & was like, "hey what's this?" I opened up the not-quite-apple-like thing and used PictureThis plant ID app to find out it was a black walnut seed.

I mean, it looked like a walnut for sure on the inside, but it's always good to double check. Anyway.

Beware! That bright yellow "juice" becomes POWERFUL dark brown STAIN of all stains.

My palm was stained for a week. No amount of cleaning product (I tried them all) or scrubbing got it off. Just time wore it away.

Sylvain Sester