When I first started my nursery and began hand harvesting field grown trees, I knew I was going to need a variety of tools for the job. One of the shovels I purchased from Hawken Tools was manufactured by the Bulldog Company in the U.K. It was specifically designed for digging trees and cutting roots. It was a long, narrow and curved shovel with a D handle. It was the most expensive shovel I had ever purchased as well as the most durable. I still have it today. It was like a drain spade but much more robust in construction. I could put a razor sharp edge on it which would allow me to cut the roots easily when digging plus it was built to allow prying of the tree upwards. Once I was harvesting persimmon trees, I noticed a small pignut hickory had seeded in the nursery bed which was near the road about fifty feet away. I began to dig it up and found my shovel had hung up on it so I started to pull realizing I had loosened the long root to the point I was able to bring it all up. It was a three inch seedling tree with a six foot root. It was a one year old tree. Hickory is not produced by the nursery industry because of its tap root. Tap rooted trees are not considered desirable for most production systems and difficult and slow to produce. This is one of the main reasons you don’t see hickory grown as shade trees. If you prune the root, it produces another tap root or sometimes 2-3 tap roots from the cut area. In the meantime, I was beginning to think about my little tap rooted friend and realized the parent trees which were 50 ft. tall must have immense depth to them. How far down would the roots go and when would they stop? The straight math says 1200 feet. It was weird in that the lower portion of this taproot was rather succulent and almost translucent. As I pulled it up, you could feel the pressure created by the soil around it as if it was connected to the soil via a pressurized media. There was no side branching or hair roots. Just a tap root going straight down. The depth of hickory roots was always in the back of my mind and over the years I began to ask others about it. What is the depth of a mature hickory tree? When would the roots end? I found a tree company that moves large pecans which is in the Carya genus. The roots in this pecan case go down around twenty feet or so and then hit a clay subsoil so thick that they cannot penetrate it. This makes it possible to move larger pecans in an orchard environment to their permanent location. It thins the orchard in the process and there is less waste of trees too. It turns out this clay subsoil is really the cutting off point. When I was having my well drilled, it turned out I too had a clay subsoil at 30 feet down. However my subsoil was filled with rock and coarse sand and was a loose aggregate. So it would mean that likely the hickory tree could potentially go through that if it wanted to and keep going. From there at roughly 110 feet is more or less a sandy rich soil filled with water. At that point the well pump is installed because the water column is substantial. However, a hickory root could potentially pass through that too. As long there is some dissolved oxygen, the trees roots could keep going. But would they? There is no reason to stop really if there is no physical barrier. So I asked the well driller what is below the water table. He said that in this area he was not aware of bedrock or impermeable sandstone and wasn’t sure of the depth. He told me once someone was putting in an industrial well of some sort in the nearby town and went to 1000 feet before the drill bit got hung up on something. They could not pull up the drill. It turned out they had hit an underground river forcing the drill bit to the side from the force of the water movement. Once they got it up, they took samples and found them similar in profile to Lake Superior water. I found that very interesting. So now I think I found the end of my hickory root. It taps into the waters of Lake Superior feeding its leaves with the pure waters of the great lake several hundred miles away. Even to this day, I wonder if the story is true and if the roots would go that deep. Yet every time I dig a hickory tree I do have the thought, how deep do you go my little friend. The answer comes back immediately. “Farther than you know my little friend” said the hickory tree. “Farther than you know.”