Hickory

Hickory sits in the same genus as pecan and is documented nothing like as well, which makes the pair instructive to read together.

The named clones are few, and almost all of them are chance seedlings somebody noticed — a tree on a creek bank, a tree by a road — rather than the output of a breeding programme. Grafted, they bear far sooner than seedlings: shagbark top-grafted onto shagbark or shellbark rootstock can bear in three to four years, against the long wait a seedling imposes. That gap is the entire argument for keeping named hickories in circulation, because the tree is otherwise a bet made for a generation you will not meet.

The identity problem is real and documented. The National Collection of Genetic Resources for Pecans and Hickories holds an accession long labelled ‘Jones hybrid’. In 2016 a USDA study combining phenotypic and genetic profiling concluded it is in fact ‘Siers’, a cultivar of Carya × laneyi — a shagbark crossed with bitternut, not the hybrid the label claimed. That is a federal collection, professionally curated, and the name was still wrong for decades. Treat every hickory cultivar name in the nursery trade with the caution that case earns, and treat a nursery’s species attribution as a claim rather than a fact.

The hicans are pecan crossed with a hickory, and they are worth a grower’s scepticism in the other direction: they are frequently sold on the promise of pecan quality with hickory hardiness, and reports of their productivity are erratic between sites and between years.

One regional thread runs through this file. Three of the best-documented shellbark selections — ‘Fayette’, ‘Henry’ and ‘Keystone’ — were found and introduced by Fayette Etter in Franklin County, Pennsylvania between the 1930s and the 1950s. A single person paying attention in one county produced a disproportionate share of the named shellbark hickories in existence.