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The Monday Garden
Great Americans: Tulip, the Tree Kind
Issue No. 95 - January 18, 2004
by Sue Sweeney
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The extreme cold has kept everyone inside, and now, once more,
the sound of Sunday-morning snowplows. When you can get out,
though, winter is a great time for tree viewing. |
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Here's a Liriodendron tulipifera, otherwise known as our
towering native tulip tree. It's kin to the magnolias, but is
often called a white or yellow poplar because its leaves shimmer
in the breeze like poplars and aspens.
The tulip is TALL, second in North American only
to the Giant Sequoia. Tulips often reach 150 feet with diameters up to 8
feet; they can live 300 years. (Compare the sequoia: 300', 30' diameter,
and 3,000 years).
What distinguishes the tulip is good posture.
It's a very straight tree. The up-reaching branches have
elbow-like bends and the bottom branches may be as high as 80'
from the ground. The gray-brown bark has deep, vertical furrows
like an elm. These Ent-like features could also describe some
lindens and nut trees, so crane your neck and check the branch
tips. The tulip holds on to its seed cones all winter.
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Tulip
have lovely flowers in spring, water lily-shaped and greenish
with orange stripes. However, they're 'way, 'way up there, so
look for a fallen one or bring the binoculars. Over the summer,
the flowers mature into
light brown cones that split open in the fall, shedding
winged seeds (samaras) until spring. |
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The
leaves have four points, two on each side, like a webbed
duck foot that's missing the forward pointing toe. The leaves
turn a lovely yellow in the fall. |
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In the wild, tulips have a wide natural range, from Northern
Florida and Louisiana, to Michigan, Southern Ontario, and
Southern New England. The best ones, they say, are in the Ohio
Valley. Tulips like deep rich soil with adequate moisture and
good drainage. It's said that they languish in soil that's too
wet or too dry. Tulips are good urban trees for large, open
spaces. They're resistant to pests and they "play well with
others"; the trees are tall enough that they don't shade out the
competition. There are plenty of nice ones in my town (Stamford)
but the trees are so tall that I think that people may not be
aware of them unless they spend a lot of time looking upwards
(to view the red-tailed hawk?).
Tulip trees are know as "honey trees" -- a single teenage
tree (e.g. 25 years old) is said to produce something like 8
pounds of nectar, which must be a lot the way the experts talk
about it. The seeds are also food for the songbirds, squirrels,
mice and rabbits.
Curiously, tulips are one of the fastest growing hardwoods.
(Note, that "fast" is a relative term when talking about trees.)
This makes tulips commercially attractive for lumber. Tulips
have fine-grained wood that's soft enough to be easily worked
but hard enough to take a high polish. The Native American once
made the giant, straight trunks into canoes; today tulip lumber
is used for toys, furniture, paneling, veneer, crates and pulp.
Picture site: Stamford, CT, Mill River Park,
Broad Street and Greenwich Avenue. |
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