Keystone
Carya laciniosa
The record
- Parentage
- Carya laciniosa
- Origin
- Found by Fayette Etter · On a creek bank in Franklin County, Pennsylvania · 1955
- Rights
- rights unknown — No patent, certificate, or trademark found in the sources consulted.
- Nut
- Relatively thin-shelled, cracking out in whole halves
- Yield
- Very productive
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 5
- Flavour
- Reported excellent
Description
Found on a creek bank in Franklin County, Pennsylvania in 1955, and propagated by grafting from there.
It is the best-documented of the three Etter shellbarks and the clearest case for what this database is for. Shellbark hickory is a hard crop: enormous nuts in an enormous shell, slow to bear, and mostly planted as seedlings that will not resemble their parent. A named clone with a thin shell that cracks into halves is worth an order of magnitude more to a grower than an unselected seedling, and the only thing standing between the two is a name attached to a graft.
One person, one county, one creek bank. That is how most of this file was assembled.
Where to find it
No source recorded. That does not mean the cultivar is unavailable, only that this record does not yet name a nursery carrying it. Point us at one and it goes in.