Nuts
Nuts are the forest’s keeping food. In the Elderweald the Wood Elf households gather them where they fall, with fruit, fungus, and roots, and they are among the few things the forest trades away, because no tree is cut to get them. In the Crownboughs the High Elf houses grow nut trees on purpose, trained into the canopy gardens and the planted understorey. A nut stores through the winter, travels without spoiling, and feeds well, and both forests count a good mast year as a gift.
Appearance
The forests give several kinds, and gatherers name them plainly by the tree.
Hazel nuts
Hazel grows as a many-stemmed thicket at the forest edge and in clearings, twice a person’s height, with soft round toothed leaves and catkins that hang yellow in late winter before any leaf opens. Its nuts sit two or three together in ragged green husks, ripening brown, smooth, and round as a fingertip.
Forest mast
The great nut trees of the deep weald drop their mast in autumn: spiny green husks the size of a fist that split to show two or three glossy dark brown nuts, and smaller hard-shelled nuts in wrinkled green rinds that stain the fingers black. The canopy is loud with falling husks on a windy autumn night, and the floor beneath smells of leaf-rot and bruised rind for weeks.
Habitat and Range
Nut trees grow throughout the old forest of the Elderweald, thickest at clearings and along the streams, and in the composed canopy gardens of the Crownboughs. Hazel follows the forest edge out towards the basin fields.
Behaviour and Temperament
Nut trees bear unevenly, heavily one year and hardly at all the next, and no one has learned to make them do otherwise. Squirrels, jays, and deer take a share before the gatherers come, and bury some, which is how a forest plants itself. Hazel cut to the ground regrows from the stool in a few years.
Life Cycle
The nut trees flower in spring and drop their nuts in autumn. Most bear heavily only every few years, and a mast year, when every tree bears at once, fills the forest floor and every store. A great tree may bear for centuries.
Uses and Dangers
Nuts are eaten fresh, roasted, dried, or ground into a meal for flat cakes, and pressed for oil. Travellers in the Elderweald are fed nuts and smoked dark fungus at the noon rest. Deer grow fat on the mast, and so do the beasts that hunt them. Nuts go out of the Elderweald with fruit, fungus, resin, medicinal herbs, and seasoned deadwood, as part of what the forest lets fall, never cut.
Their dangers are small: a fall from a garden-walk during the picking, and in the deep weald, an autumn full of falling husks.
Lore and Belief
To the Wood Elves of the Rootcrown Concord, what the forest lets fall is offered, and to gather it is to accept. A household that shakes a tree for its nuts rather than wait for them is thought greedy, and one that takes the whole mast and leaves none for the beasts is thought worse. High Elves of the Crownbough Courts give a well-trained nut tree as a mark of patience, and its grafts are gifts, never sold.