Common walnut

Juglans regia - Common Walnut

The terrible winter of 1709 decimated France's walnut trees. That of 1788 left them with deep cracks that weakened their growth for decades.

Yet, the walnut tree has endured through centuries: a tree of legend and contradiction, it offers precious wood to cabinetmakers and sculptors, oil with multiple virtues, sought-after fruits... all while reigning solitarily, tolerating no cultivation at its feet.

This plate by Poiteau captures the botanical majesty of a giant that grows for eighty years and can live for two centuries.

A large tree of the terebinth family, native to Asia, the walnut tree is recognized by its alternate, winged leaves, its male flowers arranged in catkins, and its female flowers grouped in threes to twenties at the tips of the shoots.

Its fruit, the walnut, consists of a fleshy husk enveloping a bony shell that encloses the four-lobed kernel. Formidable for its dense shade and invasive roots, the walnut tree demands isolation: neither cereals nor fruit trees thrive in its vicinity.

It is destined for stony hillsides exposed to the west, for the edges of pastures, for crossroads where it reigns supreme.

It takes ten to fifteen years for its first fruits, sixty years for its full yield.

Its wood, sought after by joiners and coachbuilders, never warps once dry. Its dried catkins treat dysentery, its oil is used in medicine and painting, and fresh walnuts, the kernels, stimulate appetite, although those with delicate chests should be wary.

This plate is taken from Pierre-Antoine Poiteau and Pierre Jean François Turpin's Traité des Arbres Fruitiers (Treatise on Fruit Trees), a botanical encyclopedia published between 1807 and 1835, a major reference for 19th-century naturalist illustration.

It combines the rigor of scientific drawing with a rare artistic sensibility, characteristic of the great plates from the golden age of illustrated botany.