A forest, not an orchard
In Europe a walnut tree stands out from a distance: alone in a field, or in a row in an orchard. In Central Asia it is one of a crowd. On the slopes of the Heavenly Mountains and around the Fergana valley the common walnut forms whole forests, mixed in with maple, wild apple, pistachio and hawthorn.
These forests are not the result of planting. The species occurs there naturally: it is its home range, the place it became itself before anyone thought to cultivate it. The largest of them, in southern Kyrgyzstan, are among the biggest naturally occurring walnut stands in the world.
The walnut was not domesticated in Europe. It was invited.
What the mountains demand
The walnut is hard to satisfy. It needs a winter cold enough to send it fully dormant, a spring that has finished frosting by the time it wakes — it comes into leaf late, precisely to miss the last frosts — and then a hot dry summer to fill the kernel.
The valleys of Central Asia hold to that programme on their own: snow in winter, dry heat in summer, cool nights at altitude. Elsewhere, growing walnuts means correcting the climate. There, there is nothing to correct.
Harvesting a forest
You do not harvest a forest the way you harvest an orchard. No rows, no tractor between the trees, no net spread on the ground. In autumn, when the husks split and the nuts drop, they are gathered off the forest floor, then hulled and dried.
It is slow, and it has two consequences for anyone buying: consistency is judged lot by lot, on the goods themselves, and the calendar follows the mountains before it follows the trading year.