With a chill still in the air, I've been exercising that arch contradiction of using a computer beside a blazing open fire. I suppose I could turn it around and write this diary on a clay tablet by the warmth of some clever geo-thermal ground source radiator, but where's the fun it that. Besides, I'm not sure how I'd email the clay tablet to the editor.

For added flavour, much of the fuel tonight has been waste chips and ends of the Black Walnut root plate I hacked up a couple of weeks back. Various slabs are off to make shotgun and rifle butts, and figured coffee tables, but other chunks are warming my toes. Technically, it must be about the most expensive firewood I could use, but hey! Let's push the boat out.

The American Black Walnut deserves some thought in fact. It is, obviously enough, an American native, only having been introduced here about 400 years ago – gardener John Tradescant reputedly had one growing in South Lambeth in 1633. This compares with what we'd call English Walnut – which is nothing of the sort, but a native of central Asia, likely delivered to our shores with the Romans, via the Greeks.

They thought the nuts were good for the brain, cos they looked a bit like the old grey matter, but then they had all sorts of wacky theories.

The nuts of the Black Walnut are also edible, although it is the timber which interests your scribe most. When fresh sawn it is a sickly greeny colour, streaked with black. As the surface dries it quickly attains a black-brown hue, with an unexpected and unlikely hint of purple running through it. While not just as valuable as its European counterpart, which tends to a more tobacco brown colour, it is still highly prized. Due to difficulty transplanting it, with a fragile tap root, it's seldom grown over here commercially, even though in favoured sites it grows into immense sizes. The root plate I've just dismembered was dug out from the grounds of Killerton House, after the tree had been condemned and felled. ('Oh' said my old mum, on my return, 'I use to go to parties there when I was a little girl').

The main trunk alone had 22' of clean timber, averaged more than 3 feet in diameter, and had made a trunk worth several thousand in just about a hundred years. Despite some fag packet maths suggesting that the return might be very respectable, growing the things on a commercial scale, I only know one forest owner who is pursuing the theory. Unfortunately, cute as that man is, his clay land is much better suited to oak, and I worry he's flogging a dead nag with his walnuts.

If you're going to pursue such arcane interests, I advise careful research into your soils capacity, and do watch the provenance of the stock you plant. They're not all as wont to make such clean upstanding sticks as that one was. This advice applies to many of life's endeavours. In fact, we could probably stretch the metaphor to cover almost everything! I'll return to matching provenance with conditions another day.

Back to the tree from Killerton. I was unsuccessful in buying the main stick, but did secure the root and some big limbs, and had been sitting on the bigger chunk of this treasure for about 15 years when we finally broke it down. It is perfectly durable, and I wasn't disappointed. I don't generally bother with walnut roots as the bother is far more than the return, but this one was immense and rippled beautifully as it went beneath the ground. Result.

While sitting beside the aforementioned fire, I have also been busy stuffing envelopes, the special offer on 'the book' having gone very well. An unexpected bonus has been the snaring of a few bookshop stockists, although for reasons unfathomed one or two chains will only carry the book in stores nearest Dartmoor, convinced interest will be focussed locally.

And I must take the opportunity to thank everyone for their kind comments. If I can distil some coherent answer to the messages received, it is…. yes, I'll do my best to keep 'sticking it to em'. Apart from copies going around the region, I hear they're fetching up in all manner of far-flung spots. Several have crossed the Atlantic, including a copy that's found its way to Brazil. I wonder what they make of it?