Endangered Butternut trees naturalized in Vancouver?

Previously published February 26, 2022 on my old blog

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Butternuts are a tree it’s hard not get obsessed with. Their famously rare, tasty, creamy, buttery nut. A nut that I’ve still yet to try, but (annoyingly) consistently read and hear people raving about. Even the Vikings, who were the first to cross the Atlantic Ocean to North America, seemed to love it. Old Butternut shells in a Viking encampment in Newfoundland and Labrador – too far north for the Butternut to grow – are proof the Vikings travelled deeper into North America then thought OR engaged in trade with First Nations. Both equally fascinating conclusions.

Butternut wood burl + nut found in Viking encampment in L’Anse aux Meadows

No nut for me yet because Butternut trees are endangered and headed toward extinction. The Butternut canker has killed a large percentage of their population and scientists now scrambling to create disease resistant hybrids to ensure they don’t vanish completely.

I’ve personally witnessed a number of young Butternuts planted in Ontario cities, only see them quickly killed off by the canker within a couple years of planting.

Butternut shape vs Black Walnut shape via Practical Self Reliance

I’ve spent a lot of time wandering around Southern Ontario cities and forests searching for large Butternuts but only twice have I come across two large and healthy ones. One growing in Kitchener along the banks of the Grand River which was apparently planted in the early 1900s as apart of abandoned arboretum but now is a mostly naturalized forest. Another, surprisingly, growing in someone’s front lawn just behind my apartment in Guelph. The city in their street-tree database had mislabeled it as Butternut’s sibling species, the very similar Black Walnut, but there was no denying those football shaped nuts compared to Black Walnut’s spherical, tennis-ball-looking ones. I got a good “deer in headlights” look from the owner of that house once when I caught them outside once and proceeded to give them waaay too much information about their tree.

So imagine my surprise to move to Vancouver and start regularly seeing Butternuts growing in people’s lawns. This is an ongoing shock for me. How easy and casual Vancouver has trees growing that are native to my home but next to extinct there. From the Chestnuts to the Elms, to the extreme-common-ten-years-ago Ash trees that are now vanishing rapidly thanks to the Emerald Ash Borer.

I’ll just be walking down the street thinking about the world falling apart and then a tree will catch my eye and I’ll be “Wait. Is that? No. Wait, what?”. It’s an immediate mood booster. Trees yo. They walk that line between fantasy and reality. The same species so prominent in our historical myths and legends are still here. Just hanging around. A world full of wonder if we just slow down and take the time to look.

There’s a stretch in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Kerrisdale, on Yew street (Name more streets after trees and not people who turn out to be slave-owners please!) in-between 37th and 40th that has a stretch of mature Butternuts that makes me lose my mind.

But fancy and rare trees in front lawns will only get you so far. You know what is better then this? A tree that wasn’t grown in a nursery, then planted and now watered and cared for and is essentially just a large potted plant without the pot. A tree that grew on its own. Often non-native trees that ‘grow on their own’ tend to be invasive, like one of Vancouver’s favourite street trees: The Sycamore Maple. But a number of them, like English Oak or Horsechesnut, are not invasive – they don’t take over any area and let nothing else grow – but rather just are ‘naturalized’. Reproducing and growing without being selfish and dominating.

So you gotta know by now that finding a naturalized Butternut in Vancouver was my holy grail. I spent the good part of last summer trying to hunt them down, with no evidence or proof that one could even naturalize or grow in Vancouver. It’s a bit of weird biological fact, that I still haven’t been able to fully explain to myself, that just because a planted tree can flourish and grow to massive size, doesn’t mean it can reproduce naturally. Good examples of this are the True Cedars and Norway Spruces which thrive and get HUGE in Vancouver but – despite an insane amount of seed production – will have no seedlings come from them.

Imagine me in a forest looking at every tree. That’s a lot of trees. Thankfully Butternuts are relatively easy to identify thanks to their compound leaves. But another challenge lies in determining if whether they are a Black Walnut, which is also a widely planted street tree here. Without the nuts (which they won’t produce if too young or if it is rough year) it can be almost impossible to tell. The bark and leaves look the exact same, but Butternut can be identified from Walnut via feel, with its twigs and leaves being much hairier. This only helps though if you can reach the branches!

Butternuts, like other nut trees, do not grow well in shade, so I wasn’t going to have much luck finding them in established Vancouver forests, under the heavy shade of the giant conifers here. I need more disturbed and recently grown forests, where a squirrel might have buried a Butternut in a patch of sun and then forgotten about it.

Ok. Enough build-up! You get it. I’m setting this up to be a fools mission, but I wrote blog post so obviously I found at least one. Up to a few months ago I found a couple! One in the strange wonderland that is Jericho Beach Park Forest, hidden in a large patch of rapidly evolving, invasive Sycamore Maples. Another growing just up the cliffs of Pacific Spirit Park along Spanish Banks in a native Big-Leaf Maple forest of what used to be a dairy farm.

Both of these are relatively mature trees that didn’t produce any nuts last summer, but I’m hoping they might do so this year. I have no plans to eat these nuts! (I’ll be tasting the ones from the street trees. If I can get them before the squirrels) But I am hoping that maybe these nuts can germinate and grow to make more naturalized Butternuts.

Finding these two trees was exciting. But they weren’t the highlight. It’s not well known, but Vancouver actually only has one patch of forest left that was never logged. Wreck Beach. Vancouver’s famous nude beach, where you can sunbathe along giant washed-up logs that are remnants of some of the largest trees in the world. If you can escape seeing some of the hottest people in the world naked (Vancouver’s film industry and mild temperatures equals an endless supply of conventionally attractive, fit people) and those dazzling sunsets and retreat into the woods along the cliff, it’s a different reality in there.

In there you can find rare native trees that used to cover Vancouver but now next to impossible to even find in it’s forest parks. Like swelling, smooth-barked Grand Firs, whose lack of taper puts even Douglas Fir’s to shame, and the legendary deadly Pacific Yew, who was overlogged when it was discovered it produced a powerful anti-cancer drug. So imagine my surprised one day to be hiking in there with a friend and discovering a section of baby Butternut trees. Unreal. Impossible.

Unfortunately, I was so lost in the rapture of that forest that I have been unable to find them again. I have searched for them a bunch of times now and no luck. It’s like the forest doesn’t want them to be found. Fall and Winter has made it harder to find them with their lack of leaves. But I’ll be back there this summer. And hopefully I’ll track them down again.

There’s been a number of cliff-slides and downed trees in that forest with windstorms and floods. They also might have died under the strain of last summer’s heatwave. Maybe they are gone now. But maybe there are more I haven’t seen yet. I’m going to keep hunting. Keep looking. Butternuts are a tree it’s hard to not get obsessed with.