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What is Turkish Walnut? Simply put Turkish walnut is the finest walnut known to the gun, gunstock or custom gun industry and highly favored by the worlds finest furniture craftsmen when the opportunity and funds provide. It has been known by many many names in it's colorful history. Old world walnut, Kings Fruit, Royal walnut, Soft-shelled walnut, and even an acorn the Romans knew it as Jupiter's acorn! French Walnut, Moroccan walnut, Spanish walnut, English walnut, Circassian walnut, Australian walnut, New Zealand walnut, California and California-English walnut and Turkish walnut are all the same walnut....Juglans Regia, the Regal Walnut is the Latin/Scientific name at the core. While there are a great multitude of walnut species, even within Juglans Regia, there are also mutations that exist. It is often grown in orchards primarily for its fruit. The fruit or the nut of the soft shelled walnut has a delicate flavor lower in acid than other walnut species. The wood is a fine dense grain with long fibers and a strong crush resistance. The wood is very strong and resilient without undue weight. It is hard without being brittle. It machines, cuts and checkers very finely and takes a traditional oil finish that brings out the best in the wood. Juglans Regia is the first choice of most custom gunmakers and gunstock aficionados the world over. It does all things required of a gunstock very well and excels beyond other walnut species in most. What immediately separates Turkish walnut from its geological counterparts is several things. First is age. Turkish walnut trees are often 2 -5 hundred years old. This by its very nature produces fine wood, wood of character full of figure and contrast known as marblecake. Age also permits the tree to grow to massive size. This imparts stress on the tree resulting in an increase in desirable figure once again, fiddleback or curl. Second is the region in which these trees grow. Aside from it being considered the origin of Juglans Regia Eastern Europe and the Middle-East are arid dry climates, hot summers and cold harsh winter seasons produce slow growing dense trees. This results in a finer dense grain in the wood that cannot be hurried and must be grown slowly with the passage of time. Wood of this class is the most sought after for its working qualities and often times brings a higher price when compared to a more highly figured stock blank that is punky or from an orchard. High up on the harsh windy mountains of Turkey the finest grained Turkish walnut grows full of ink-black marblecake laced together with vivid 3-D fiddleback. This is a stark contrast to the fertile valleys of California where many of the trees grow in orchards that are watered year round producing more open pores in the wood. In addition, most orchard trees are harvested long before the age of 75. So you see, they are the same nut, but far from the same tree.
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