I Had a Little Nut Tree
I had a little nut tree, nothing would it bear
But a silver nutmeg and a golden pear;
The king of Spain’s daughter came to visit me,
And all was because of my little nut tree.
I skipped over water, I danced over sea,
And all the birds in the air couldn’t catch me.
Where the rhyme comes from
The earliest printing known to the Opies, whose Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes is the standard reference, is in The Newest Christmas Box, published in London in 1797. We have not seen that book ourselves, so we cannot say how closely its words match the ones above.
The version given here, with the skipping couplet attached, is the one James Orchard Halliwell printed in The Nursery Rhymes of England; we have followed the fifth edition of 1886. Many modern books and websites give a longer rhyme in four short stanzas, adding that the princess’s “dress was made of crimson, jet black was her hair”, that she asked for the nutmeg and the golden pear, and that the speaker, struck by “so fair a princess”, promised her all the fruit on the tree. We have not found out when those extra stanzas were added, so we do not date them. Words vary from book to book, and none of the versions is the one “true” text.
What does it mean?
Joanna of Castile. The best-known suggestion comes from Halliwell himself. Above the rhyme he added a note saying that it perhaps refers to Joanna of Castile, who visited the court of Henry VII in 1506. It was a hedged guess, made decades after the first printing and more than three centuries after the event, and no evidence has been produced to support it. Some websites now state the connection as though it were settled; it is not.
Everything else. Nobody has shown what the silver nutmeg and the golden pear stand for, or whether they stand for anything at all. The honest answer is that the meaning is unknown. What survives is a small, glittering picture: a tree that will bear nothing ordinary, and a royal visitor who arrives because of it.
Sharing it with children
Make the tree first. A bare branch in a jar, or a tree drawn on paper, can be hung with silver “nutmegs” and golden “pears” cut from foil or card. Count them aloud together, nutmegs first and then pears, and ask which pile is bigger. Children can take turns being the visitor who comes to the tree, and the person holding the tree chooses what to hand over.
The second verse is made for movement. Skip, hop or dance across the room on “I skipped over water, I danced over sea”, then on “couldn’t catch me” let the grown-up play the birds and make a gentle chase. Laying a blue scarf or blanket on the floor gives the “water” something to skip over.
Extra verses to sing
These verses aren’t traditional — they’re ours. Sing them to the same lilting beat once the tree is built.
I had a little garden
Beside a mossy wall,
I shared my golden pears
Till there were none at all.
I counted all my nutmegs,
I counted them once more,
And every one was silver
As I counted up to four.