A Sufi tale:
"Bayazid and the Selfish Man"
One day a man reproached Bayazid, the great mystic of the ninth century, saying that he had fasted and prayed and so on for thirty years and not found the joy which Bayazid described. Bayazid told him that he might continue for 300 years and still not find it.
"How is that?" asked the would-be illuminate.
"Because your vanity is a barrier to you."
"Tell me the remedy."
"The remedy is one which you cannot take."
"Tell me nevertheless."
Bayazid said: "You must go to the barber and have your [respectable] beard shaved. Remove all your clothes and put a girdle around yourself. Fill a nosebag with walnuts and suspend it from your neck. Go to the marketplace and call out: 'A walnut will I give to any boy who will strike me on the back of the neck.' Then continue on to the justices' session so that they may see you."
"But I cannot do that; please tell me something else that would do as well."
"This is the first move, and the only one," said Bayazid, "but I had already told you that you would not do it; so you cannot be cured."
--a parable from El-Ghazali, Alchemy of Happiness

A Japanese Folktale:
"The Kobo Chestnut Trees"
In the mountains around Fukiage Pass in Nagura-mura, Kita Shidara-gun, grow chestnut trees called Kobo chestnuts. Those trees bear fruit very young, even when they are only 3 feet high.
Hundreds of years ago there was a big chestnut tree on this pass. Boys would rush to climb it to pick the chestnuts, but little children could not climb the tree. One day while they were weeping, a traveling priest passed by, saw the little children crying, and said: "Well, you shall be able to pick the chestnuts from next year on."
The next year every small young chestnut tree bore fruit so that the little children could pick them easily. The villagers thought that the traveling priest must have been St. Kobo, and since then they have called these the Kobo chestnut trees.

Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Chestnut on the Ground," translated by M.S. Peden from "Oda a una Castaña en el Suelo"
From bristly foliage
you fell
complete,
polished wood,
gleaming mahogany,
as perfect
as a violin newly
born of the treetops,
that falling
offers its sealed-in gifts,
the hidden sweetness
that grew in secret
amid birds and leaves,
a model of form,
kin to wood and flour,
an oval instrument
that holds within it
intact delight, an edible rose.
In the heights you abandoned
the sea-urchin burr
that parted its spines
in the light of the chestnut tree;
through that slit
you glimpsed the world,
birds
bursting with syllables,
starry
dew,
below,
the heads of boys
and girls,
grasses stirring restlessly,
smoke rising, rising.
You made your decision,
chestnut,
and leaped to earth,
burnished and ready,
firm and smooth
as the small breasts
of the islands of America.
You fell,
you struck
the ground,
but
nothing happened,
the grass
still stirred, the old
chestnut sighed with the mouths
of a forest of trees,
a red leaf of autumn fell,
resolutely, the hours marched on
across the earth.
Because you are
only
a seed,
chestnut tree, autumn, earth,
water, heights, silence
prepared the germ,
the floury density,
the maternal eyelids
that buried will again
open toward the heights
the simple majesty
of foliage,
the dark damp plan
of new roots,
the ancient but new dimensions
of another chestnut tree in the earth.

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What are they? Botanically, they are single-seeded, dry fruit that comes packed in a shell. When we talk about legumes as "peanuts"...and about seeds as "coconuts" and as "pine nuts" and as "Brazil nuts," we're speaking loosely. We're even speaking loosely when we include walnuts and almonds, since botanists exclude their fleshy, succulent fruit layer from true definition of "one-seeded fruits with a tough DRY fruit layer" (that is, only trees of the Fagale order--that produce acorns, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and sweet chestnuts).

What's amazing about all these "nuts," though, is their great antiquity. Walnuts, hazelnuts, chestnuts, acorns, and pine nuts ALL began life in both the Old World and the New World--for the simple reason that they proliferated on earth before the continents split apart, some 60 million years ago, to line up in different hemispheres.

Almonds (Prunus dulcis of the Rosacea family):

"Like to an Almond tree mounted hye
On top of greene Selinis all alone
With blossoms brave bedecked daintily"
--Edmund Spenser, Fairie Queene, I: 7, 32

Almonds were not cultivated in North America until quite late in world history. Spanish Franciscan priests tried to plant them from seed without success in 1769. Finally, nearly 100 years later, the trees took root in north central California.

Most almonds are used in their dried form--often toasted. But they are marvelous just beaten off the tree and eaten fresh, split out of their fuzzy green husks.

Interesting how different cultures interpreted the trees habit of flowering before leafing. Biblical Hebrews thus regarded the almond as a symbol of haste because of its sudden blossoming. Thophrastus in Ancient Greece was content to record the phenomenon. Moslems associated saw these almond blossoms as a symbol of hope bursting out. Modern Czechs, Italians, and Greeks see them as good luck and long life--and give out the nuts at weddings.

So far as use, Pliny, Plutarch, and later the English Gerard believed that almonds were a viable cure for drunkeness.

Brazil Nuts (Bertholletia excelsa):

Cashews (Anacardium occidentale):

The Portuguese carried the cashew tree to India in the 16th century and successfully transplanted it there and in East Africa. Other edible cashew nuts varieties include Anacardium humile (the Monkey nut), A. namum, and A rhinocarpus (the Wild cashew)

Chestnuts (Castania fagaceae):

This European species was introduced to America by the French aristocratic family of Dupon Nemours, who emigrated to the East Coast before the French Revolution. It was this species that Thomas Jefferson ultimately grafted onto Virginia root stock.

"When chestnuts were ripe, I laid up half a bushel for winter."
--Henry David Thoreau, Walden

It is precisely because the chestnut, in its great antiquity, is native to Mediterranean Europe, America, and Central Asia/China that there is some hope for American chestnuts recovering from the chestnut blight that struck them early in the 20th century--and that virtually decimated the native population.

Native Americans on the Eastern seaboard relished the American chestnut--consider the Iroquois myth "Hodadenon and the Chestnut Tree," where a small boy foolishly destroys his uncle's last supply of dried chestnuts, ensuring the uncle's death unless he can release the spell cast on the only existing chestnut grove by 7 evil witches. Hodadenon breaks the spell over the grove's enslaved guardians--panthers, bears, and rattlesnakes--and suddenly the dead rise to life and the earth is fruitful once more. He declares chestnuts sacred...and to be shared with everyone forever.

Coconuts (Cocos nucifera): see its individual entry

Hazelnuts, or Filberts (Corylus family):

Hazel shrubs produce flowers before the leaves--the male in catkins; the female, inconspicuous; both on the same tree. Thus accounting perhaps for Virginia Woolf's description of Osbert (brother of Edith) Sitwell's poems: "All foliage and no filberts."

American hazels (Corylus americana) are often gathered, but rarely cultivated and sold. The big exception occurs in Oregon--but not with the American nut. Legend has it that Frenchman David Gernot arrived in Oregon in the 17th century with European hazel trees and a personal mission. When he stumbled into the beautiful Willamette Valley, he was reminded of his home in the Loire valley. Without hesitation, he staked out his home and planted the first of his 50-tree grove. Other planters followed and by the early 1900s, hazelnut orchards had taken root in Oregon, where their nuts are produced commercially to this day. This memoir was recently given shape to me when, while biking along the Loire, I stopped to see a potter I had just met--and found her out gathering a bountiful harvest of hazels from the trees that lined her property.

Macadamia nuts (Macadamia intergricolia):

Peanuts (Arachis hypogaea):

It's an odd growing plant--a pea plant that undergoes pollination of its yellow flower, then, as the stalk lengthens, pushes the woody pod into the ground, where it matures underground. Today's biggest producers are Indian and China--the largest exporter, Nigeria.

Pecan nuts...and hickory nuts (Carya species from the order Juglandaceae):

Teddy Roosevelt, in 1885, wrote of one of his hunting trips through west Texas:

"This beautiful fertile valley, through which the deep, silent stream of the Llano flows, is densely wooded with grand old pecan trees along its banks; as are those of its minor tributaries which come boiling down from off the immense upland water-shed of the staked plains, cutting the sides of the 'divide' into narrow canyons."

Of course pecan trees don't produce at all until after 6 years--and don't produce fully until they're pushing 20. Pecans were introduced to England in 1629, and now they are grown as a crop in Australia. Generally speaking, the rest of the hickories aren't cultivated, though their nuts can be quite good.

Pine nuts (Pinus family):

Pistachios (Pistacia vera):

Beyond that, It is said that pistachios were brought to Rome by Vitellius and were cultivated there. They were not introduced to England, however, until the 16th and 17th centuries...and never really took. But when the U.S. Patent Office distributed pistachio seeds to California in 1854 , the trees fell in love with the place.

Oddly, the nuts did not become popular in the U.S. until they were made an item in the newfangled vending machines that were introduced in the 30s. Yet today crops from California rival the output of the the Mediterranean and Turkey. The tree grows to some 20-30 feet high; staminate and pistillate flowers are born on separate trees.

Walnuts (Juglans juglandaceae)

There are 17 recognized species--all edible. "Persians" (Juglans regia) are considered the most tasty. They are supposed to have originated in southeast Europe and warm parts of Asia. They've been found growing around ancient Baalbek and over the walls of Constantinople.

Walnuts soon spread to Greece, where they were called caryon or head, because Greeks saw the shell as a human skull and the nut as human brains. Accordinly, it was thought that walnuts cured headaches. That old "association" thing, I guess.

Thence they traveled to Rome, where they were known as Royal Nut and as Nut of Jupiter. Juglans, in fact, is a contraction of "Jove's acorn" or Jovis glansPliny said, "chewing a nut fasting is a sovereign remedy against a rabid dog." Walnuts were also thought to be good for decayed teeth or, when taken with figs, for digestion.

Romans took the walnut to France, where the French used its oil for cooking and for thickening sauces. It didn't reach England until the 16th century. At that point, they were called WALnuts, from "wal" meaning "foreign." And the English took Persian walnuts to New England and called them "English nuts" to distinguish them from the native so-called "Black walnuts" (Juglans nigra). The butternut (Juglans cinerea) is also a delicious edible native walnut. Franciscan monks planted the Persian nut in California in the 18th century, while founding Spanish missions there.