Butternut syrup

There is a sad, shabby butternut in my backyard. Like virtually all of its kind since a devastating fungus took hold across its range, it festers with weeping cankers, and a number of its branches are bare and broken. The diseased wood beneath the bark is probably dark and spongy, which is a real shame for a lovely furniture wood, and it makes me sad for the tree.Still, it has been this way for nearly a decade and it struggles on from year to year. My poor Juglens cinerea is late to leaf but still manages to produce a crown of foliage sufficient for welcome shade, and in late summer there are sticky hulled nuts hanging alongside its compound leaves. Perhaps it has some resistance to the blight, a possibility I know I should not discount. My children love the tree. But I have plans for it. Butternut is among those tree species from which sugar syrup can be produced. It requires, I am told, as much as four times as much butternut sap as hard maple to produce syrup, but this year I am planning to set one spile as an experiment. I will sugar off as many gallons of sap as I can harvest and compare the result to the sugar from our backyard maple. If the experience is favorable, I will leave it be for an other year. If not, I plan to make a totem pole.Shagbark hickory is another sweet sap-producing species. The native peoples from Ohio to the edge of the Minnesota prairie made an earthy, smoky syrup from boiled hickory chips as well as from sap. The Iroquois, who were blessed with an abundant sugarbush of rock maples, utilized the shagbark hickory nutmeats in many other ways. Henry David Thoreau wrote about his red maple sugar camp, noting that four-and-a-half pints of sap yielded about an ounce and a half of granular sugar. I have not experimented with tapping soft maples, but understand that even the invasive Norway maple can be tapped and reduced to a sweet syrup. Box elder also has a sugar content, though I cannot attest to its flavor. Black walnut trees also can be used in this way. The twigs and sap of yellow and black birch, on the other hand, make a fine birch beer, and this I have tried and enjoyed.In just a few more weeks the sap will start to run. Sugarhouses across the Litchfield Hills will emit their clouds of sweet steam. In my kitchen there will be two evaporators at work on the stove. My sugar maple will provide the sap for one, my butternut the other. I will deem the outcome successful whether or not I practice my chiseler’s art on butternut wood this summer or let it stand another year to enjoy in shade and syrup. Tim Abbott is program director of Housatonic Valley Association’s Litchfield Hills Greenprint. His blog is at greensleeves.typepad.com.