Wood Id - Black Walnut or Butternut?

[laxin213]

Neighbor cut this and I helped him buck.. Is it Black walnut or soemthing from that family? I think the leaves go with this tree and it looked like BW to me.

 

[Pellet_Pete]

Definitely a walnut of some kind, but the bark's all wrong for black walnut. A guy up the road from me has two Persian walnuts in his front yard, and they have smoother bark like that.

 

[PA. Woodsman]

I think that's some Hickory rather than Walnut but I could be wrong? If it's Hickory it'll be very heavy and have a manure kind of odor to it.

 

[CincyBurner]

Try bitternut hickory (Carya cordiformis) - dark heartwood, tight uniform bark, sulfur yellow buds, solid pith. Look at the hickory nut in the one pic.
VPI has a good factsheet - http://dendro.cnre.vt.edu/dendrology/syllabus/factsheet.cfm?ID=18
Two weeks ago picked up about 1/4 cord worth of bitternut from a small tree that fell into the road.

Butternut (Juglans cinerea) is a walnut (chambered pith), sometimes called white walnut. It is getting very rare because of a fungal disease, butternut canker (Sirococcus clavigigenti-juglandacearum Nair, Kostichka & Kuntz). Some hybrids still in wild from when CSA tried to hybridize with one of Asian butternut species to grow for rifle stocks (not sure how long someone thought Civil War was going to last).
Bud scar on butternut looks like black walnut (monkey face), but with eyebrows. Husk on butternut is elliptical (not round like black walnut), but more interestingly it's sticky. The juice from walnut will stain your hands black for days and it smells of black walnut.

 

[Oldman47]

I have a "Carpathian walnut" AKA English walnut in my back yard that looks just like that. The seeds are even at the same stage today. It has very spongy seeming soft wood. I had a 10 inch DBH one break off a couple of feet from the ground a few years back. It does sprout readily if you cut it off so I suppose it could provide low quality firewood regularly.

 

[laxin213]

I split some. It feels heavy like hickory and looks like hickory when I split it, the heartwood is lighter in color than the end grain. It didn't stain my hands. When I split some it was heavy and stringy.

 

[CincyBurner]

I considered that too, but check the pics from OP.
- The leaves are serrate. Leaves of Carpathian/ English walnut have an entire margin (not serrate).
- Fruit is 4-winged dehiscent husk (splits open). Shell/ husk of walnut is indehiscent (doesn't split open).

 

[CincyBurner]

It didn't stain my hands.

It's the husk of the walnut fruit that will stain hands.

 

[nrford]

Hickory... not a doubt in my mind.

 

[Oldman47]

I considered that too, but check the pics from OP.
- The leaves are serrate. Leaves of Carpathian/ English walnut have an entire margin (not serrate).
- Fruit is 4-winged dehiscent husk (splits open). Shell/ husk of walnut is indehiscent (doesn't split open).

My carpathian not only splits open on its own but looks just like a store bought walnut, if I can get to it before the squirrels.

 

[PA. Woodsman]

I'd rather have Hickory over Walnut any day!