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 ovata · Juglandaceae
Peeling plate bark you can read from fifty yards, five leaflets, and the sweetest nut of any wild Piedmont hickory.
Community photos of Carya ovata to study before I head out: leaf, flower or bract, ripe fruit, bark, whole plant.
A genuine NC native, "mainly in the Piedmont, sporadically in the mountains and coastal areas," and locally the most common of the shaggy-barked hickories, though less abundant overall than upland mockernut. Scattered across the Piedmont on the better soils
Best bet: Hull the nuts, run a float test (sinkers are sound; floaters are empty, weevil-hit, or immature, so compost them), then either fall-sow immediately 1–2 in deep into tall root-trainers or tree pots or straight to the final spot and let winter stratify them, or cold-moist stratify cleaned nuts ~90–120 days at ~37°F (33–40°F) and sow in spring. Cap sowings with ¼-in hardware cloth against rodents. Germinates the first spring.
A Piedmont native squarely in its range at zone 7b/8a, tolerant of heavy clay and drought once the taproot is down, and the best-eating wild hickory to grow out. Two real cautions. (1) It drives a deep taproot with almost no top growth for the first few years (first-year seedlings put ~0.3 m into the ground against ~7 cm up), so it resents bare-root transplanting. Grow in tall root-pruning containers or direct-sow to the final position. (2) It's slow and eventually 70–90+ ft, so site it with room. Prefers richer, decent-drained ground over baked droughty ridge clay.
Each look-alike with the one character that settles it. Tap a photo to zoom.
The default Piedmont hickory. Bark stays tight in rounded interlacing ridges that never form shaggy plates, leaf underside densely fuzzy with ~7 leaflets, terminal bud a fat tan thumb. Shagbark has peeling plates, ~5 mostly-smooth leaflets with hairy tooth-tips, and a stouter twig.
The Piedmont's twin, also shaggy-barked with ~5 leaflets. Current-year twigs slender and blackish (1–3 mm), bud scales dark reddish-brown to black, on circumneutral or basic upland flats and higher-pH soils. True shagbark has thick tan-gray twigs, tan buds, and richer moist slopes and bottoms. Leaflets and nuts run a touch smaller. Both are collectible sweet shagbarks; just record which one you pulled.
Also shaggy, so it fools people. Stout orange-brown twigs with orange lenticels, usually 7 (5–9) leaflets, and a noticeably bigger nut, against shagbark's gray-tan twigs, 5 leaflets, and smaller nut. Uncommon in NC, on wet bottoms.
A bright sulfur-yellow, flattened, scurfy terminal bud (unmistakable) on tight bark, with a thin 4-winged husk and a genuinely bitter, inedible nut. Nothing shaggy, nothing sweet.
The other 5-leaflet hickory. Bark stays tight, leaf teeth lack the hairy tufts, buds are small, and the thin husk splits only partway and clings to a pear-shaped, astringent nut.
Most Piedmont hickories make you walk up and read a bud. Shagbark I can call from across the draw, off the bark alone. On any trunk more than a few inches thick the gray plates lift off in long narrow strips 1–3 feet long that peel and curl away at both ends, so the whole bole looks like it's shedding armor. No tight-barked hickory (mockernut, pignut, bitternut) does that. Two exceptions: young saplings are still smooth, and very old giants can tighten up. On those, drop to the leaf and twig.
Unlike ridge-loving mockernut, shagbark leans toward better, moister ground: lower hardwood slopes, cove and bottomland margins, old-field woods on decent-drained clay-loam. Go in September and October, when the four-parted husks brown and drop their nuts to the trail and the canopy turns clear golden-yellow, peaking in October. Usually I spot the split husks and plump nuts on the ground first, then look up.
For the genus-level bud-and-bark contrasts in one place, cross-check the Mockernut guide (06); for the many-leafleted end of the genus, the Pecan guide (12).
Collect in Sep–Oct, into early November at the tail, and gather nuts the day they drop. Shagbark is the sweetest wild hickory, so squirrels and hickory-nut weevils strip the ground fast. Mature husks brown and split on their own. A green husk that won't split is immature: the embryo isn't finished and it won't grow. A round hole in the shell means a weevil larva got there first, so reject it.
Hull off the four husk sections, leaving clinging ones to dry off, then run a float test in a bucket. Sinkers are sound; floaters are empty, weevil-hit, or immature and go in the compost. The seed has embryo dormancy, satisfied by overwintering in the duff or by cold-moist stratification of ~90–120 days at ~37°F (33–40°F range) in barely-damp sand or peat. Older, drier seed needs only ~60 days.
The taproot is the make-or-break detail. Seedlings pour everything down first: first-year plants average roughly 0.3 m of taproot against ~7 cm of top growth, and by age three the taproot is ~0.8 m while the top is barely 20 cm. That deep root hates bare-root transplanting, so don't grow one in a flat and move it later. Two routes that respect it:
Either way, germination comes the first spring, top growth is slow while the root is busy, and a nursery-worthy sapling takes a couple of seasons.
Around Roxboro and Person County, skip the dry ridge crests, which are mockernut's turf. Work the richer lower slopes, cove edges, and bottomland margins at Mayo Lake and Hyco Lake game lands and along the Hyco and Flat River drainages. Farther south across the central Piedmont, Duke Forest, Eno River State Park, and Uwharrie National Forest all hold oak-hickory slopes where I can compare shagbark's peeling plates against tight-barked mockernut and pignut on the same walk. When I find a heavy-bearing tree whose nuts crack out sweet and full, I mark it and come back for it.