[David in San Antonio]

I had a very old black walnut tree in my back yard in Minnesota. My (now long deceased) 96 year old neighbor, one of the last WWI veterans, said I’d never eat a single walnut from that tree. He was right. The squirrels gnawed a hole in every single one before it fell out of the tree. Upon hearing I had this huge black walnut tree, several people told me it was worth a fortune to a furniture maker, who would pay for cutting it down and would pay me with a piece of black walnut furniture. It seemed every one of them knew someone whose brother in law showed off their gorgeous black walnut dining room table and 8 chairs and told this story every Thanksgiving. So I called a few likely prospects and found 1. It wasn’t straight enough and had too many branches (or something) to make good furniture, and 2. It was so close to my house and that of the neighbors on both sides it would be prohibitively expensive to crane it out. One more thing, according to the amateur experts: black walnut trees (they solemnly warned me) secrete a natural toxin that keeps other things from growing nearby. This turned out to be nonsense, as I planted a beautiful lawn and landscape which produced magnificent weeds every year without fail.