The Walnut Tree

Illustrating the ingratitude of those who requite good deeds with cruelty, it concerns a walnut tree (καρυα) standing by the roadside whose nuts the passersby used to knock off by throwing sticks and stones.

Eventually numbered 193 in the many editions of his Emblemata, it bore the device In fertilitatem sibi ipsi damnosam (fruitful to its own ruin), deriving from the last line of the original epigram by Antipater.

A German 'figure poem' (figurengedichte) of 1650, in which the words are so spaced as to form a tree shape, mentions both sticks and stones as the weapons used by 'peasant girls and boys' to bring down the nuts.

[7] Inspired by Alciato's emblem,[8] the poem is presented as the nut tree's soliloquy and goes on to make the wider point that the ingratitude of returning evil for generosity is a malaise that infects all social relations.

George Pettie's translation of the Civil Conversations of Stefano Guazzo (1530–93), a book first published in Italy in 1574, records that he had once come across the proverb 'A woman, an ass and a walnut tree, Bring more fruit, the more beaten they be'.

What is now the better known English version appears shortly after in the works of John Taylor, Roger L'Estrange includes Abstemius' story in his Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists a century later.

One encyclopaedia of superstitions reports that in country districts 'it was a common persuasion that whipping a walnut tree tended to increase the produce and improve the quality of the fruit' and that this took place in early spring.