I have a neighbor for whom we have no use, so here's what I did about it in today's snow/ice storm.

[NNadir]

14. The tree was huge, probably 15 or 20 meters high. It did make me nervous in high winds as it was very near my house.

I don't remember who told me what the tree was, but it filled the driveway with walnuts, so it was hard to miss. (They also filled the gutters.) It may have been my neighbor across the street, a birder and something of a amateur naturalist, one of those "amateurs" who is very sophisticated. (Unfortunately he passed away about a decade ago.)

I'm something of an amateur tree hugger; I've had a long obsession with the nearly extinct - with efforts for restoration - American Chestnut, a tree that once dominated the Eastern forest until an Asian blight was introduced when someone imported the Asian Chestnut, which was immune from the blight it carried, but for which the American Chestnut had no resistance.

One of the things about me is that when someone tells me something interesting about a tree, I eventually, sometimes immediately, go to the scientific literature, where I learned all about EPA (on which I'd ironically done some work professionally, as it has been used as a medical treatment) and juglone.

Juglone is actually something of an herbicide. This property in trees is known as "allelopathy." It "protects" the tree from competing trees and underbrush. It kills tomatoes for instance, something I found out when I tried to grow tomatoes near it.

One solution for the husk problem was actually to drive over the nuts and spray the area with water to wash away the juglone.

Interestingly, the American Chestnut is also an Allelopathic tree; I've had two on my property, one which died from the blight, and another that is still alive that I grew from the seeds of the first tree before the blight killed it. American Chestnuts can grow a few years before the blight gets them. There are many restoration attempts underway for this important tree, once the dominant tree of the American Eastern forest; it was known as the Eastern forest's answer to the redwood.

One approach is to crossbreed the tree with Asian resistant trees. Another effort, which I support, is to use genetic engineering. I follow these efforts in the literature.