Seeds and cuttings I collect around North Carolina, what they turned out to be, and how to grow them for a NC Piedmont native-plant nursery.
Carya illinoinensis · Juglandaceae
The biggest hickory, and the only one worth planting for the nut. Seedling pecans grow straight from the shell, no grafting required.
Community photos of Carya illinoinensis to study before I head out: leaf, flower or bract, ripe fruit, bark, whole plant.
Native to the Mississippi/Ohio River valley and Texas, not wild in the Carolinas, but long and widely planted across NC and naturalized around old homesites and bottomlands. Hunt it as a planted and escaped tree rather than a forest native.
Best bet: Hull, run a float test (sinkers are sound, floaters are empty or weevil-hit), then either cold-moist stratify ~90–120 days at 34–40°F and sow in spring, or fall-sow into deep pots or straight to the final spot and let winter do it. No grafting needed.
Fully hardy here (zone 7b/8a sits inside pecan's range) and fast-growing in deep Piedmont bottomland. Plant it with open eyes: 70–100+ ft at maturity so it needs real room, a seedling is slow to bear (~7–15 yrs) and not true to its parent, 2+ trees are needed for pollination, and pecan scab will spot the nuts on an unsprayed tree in our humid Southeast summers. Start from northern pecan seed so nuts fill before frost.
Each look-alike with the one character that settles it. Tap a photo to zoom.
The genuine wild look-alike, also many-leafleted with a 4-winged husk. Its buds are bright sulfur-yellow where pecan's are tan and hairy, it has fewer, broader leaflets (7–11), the husk splits only partway, and the near-round nut is intensely bitter.
Pecan's swamp cousin; they even hybridize. It grows in standing-water swamps and its nut is flat, wrinkled, and bitter. Pecan's nut is plump, round in cross-section, and sweet, on better-drained bottomland.
Also big and pinnately compound. Snap a twig: walnut pith is chambered with ladder-like partitions, pecan's is solid. Walnut's husk is a round green ball that never splits into 4, and the foliage is pungent.
Fools a fast glance from a distance. Crush a leaflet and it reeks of rank rotten peanut, and each leaflet carries 1–2 glandular bumps near its base. The fruit is a papery winged samara, not a nut.
Intermediate trees near old plantings. Nut shape and husk split sit halfway between pecan and a true hickory. Collect anyway; a vigorous seedling is a seedling.
No photos yet. The deciding character is above.
Skip the deep woods. Pecan is not a Carolina forest native; it came here in wagon-loads of planted nuts. So I'm hunting a big, straight, open-grown tree on good ground: old farmsteads and town yards, barn lots and cemeteries, fencerows, and the deep alluvial bottoms along creeks and rivers where planted trees have naturalized. Around Roxboro and Person County that means the Hyco and Mayo lakeshores, the Hyco and Flat River floodplains, and most productively a slow drive past the old rural homesites. A lone giant pecan standing by a chimney fall is the classic find.
Go in October or November. That's when the four-parted husks turn brown and split to the base, dropping thin-shelled nuts by the hundred, and the canopy turns clear yellow. Often I'll find the nuts before I find the tree, so scan the ground under any big tree carrying very long, many-leafleted compound leaves.
Collect in Oct–Nov, the day the nuts drop, once the husk has browned and split to the base. Green summer husks are immature and won't grow, and a round hole in the shell means a weevil beat me to it. Hull them and run a float test in a bucket: sinkers are sound, floaters are empty, weevil-hit, or rancid and go in the compost. Move fast, because the squirrels clear the ground quickly.
No grafting needed. Grafting is how orchards clone a named cultivar; growing seedling ("native") pecans straight from the nut is the older, simpler thing. Trade-offs to plan around:
How to grow it out:
Around Roxboro and Person County, skip the ridge forests and work the bottomlands and the old human footprint: Hyco Lake and Mayo Lake shorelines and their feeder-creek floodplains, the Hyco and Flat River bottoms, and best of all the old farmsteads, cemeteries, town yards, and fencerows where planted pecans persist and seed themselves into the surrounding low ground. Farther out across the central Piedmont, the Eno, Haw, and Neuse river bottoms hold the same planted-and-escaped pattern. When I find a heavy-bearing tree whose nuts crack out sweet and plump, I mark it and come back to it every year.