Horticulture Highlight: Honeylocust
Horticulture Highlight: Honeylocust, Gleditsia triacanthos
…transposing
such forms as can extend the flawed earth
and embody us, intact, unaltering, among
the soft surprising trees of childhood,
mimosa, honey locust, willow…
-Ellen Bryant Voigt
During a week-end long Arbor Day celebration, tours throughout our landscape visited our Massachusetts “Champion Trees”. There exist lists designating what are the biggest individuals by tree species, in the nation, state, county/city or perhaps even neighborhood. With a standardized point system, three measurements of tree height, trunk circumference and tree canopy help to determine what is a biggest individual. Near our entrance is the Massachusetts champion Honeylocust, Gleditsia triacanthos, planted in 1939 and measured at a height of 74.5-feet and 105-inches in trunk circumference.
Honeylocust, Gleditsia triacanthos is a large, tough, fast-growing, deciduous tree, with a wide spreading canopy. The Latin name honors Johann Gottlieb Gleditsch (1714-1786), German physician, botanist and director of the Berlin Botanic Garden. This small genus of a dozen different species is within the FABACEAE, the pea family, the third largest terrestrial family (after ORCHIDACEAE and ASTERACEAE) comprising 670 genera and 20,000 species. We reviewed botanical cousins within this family including redbud, yellowwood, wisteria and silktree. This family also includes soybean, common bean, lima bean, chick pea, peanut and carob to mention some of agricultural importance.
In forest virginity, this is a midwestern tree ranging from Pennsylvania to southern Minnesota and South Dakota south to Nebraska, Texas and Alabama. Extensively planted it has become widely naturalized outside of its original range. Its alternate leaves are 6 to 15” long, pinnate or bipinnately compound, with its many fine textured leaflets casting a dappled shade.
…If you were a painter, you’d paint the wind
green. It would shake the boughs of the honey locust trees.
It would chase the leaves across the continent…
-David Lehman
In late spring they produce inconspicuous, greenish-yellow, mostly unisexual male and female flowers on different trees, although some trees may also contain flowers of the opposite gender (polygamo-dioecious). If successfully fertilized, the fruit maturing in early autumn, is a 7 to 18” -long pod, containing numerous oval, hard, shiny dark brown seeds. These pods contain a sugar-rich pulp that has been eaten, even used as a sugar substitute, hence the common name honeylocust. Often these pods become irregularly twisted.
…what else but to linger in the slight shade of those sapling branches
yearning for that vernal beau. for don’t birds covet the seeds of the
honey locust…
-D. A. Powell
The species name triacanthos, alludes to bunches of thorns growing on the trunk and larger branches of wild populations. These remarkable triple-branched thorns arise from the tree’s wood and cannot be easily removed. Fortunately, thornless forms have been found. Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis (unarmed) are the source of most of our and commercially available honeylocust trees.
On a future visit to Mount Auburn look for some of our score of Honeylocust, Gleditsia triacanthos at our main entrance, Gerardia Path, Spruce Avenue, Cedar Avenue, Spelman Road, Field Road, Willow Pond Path, Begonia Path, Dogwood Path, Sorrel Path and Petunia Path among other locations.
…a factory of blue jays
in honey locust leaves…
-Yusef Komunyakaa
Horticulture Highlight: Columbine
…A woodland walk,
A quest of river grapes, a mocking thrush,
A wild rose or a rock-loving columbine
Salve my wounds…
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Referred by some as an old-fashioned favorite, Columbine, Aquilegia canadensis provides a curious and beautiful ornamental interest. The genus Aquilegia comprises 60-70 species found throughout the Northern Hemisphere. Aquilegia is within the RANUNCULACEAE, the buttercup family, which also includes the genera Anemone, Helleborus, and Xanthorhiza which we have discussed previously.
(more…)What’s In Bloom 2023
What’s in Bloom: Week of May 29, 2023
Flowering dogwood, Cornus florida ‘Aurora’, Almy Road
Carolina allspice, Calycanthus floridus, several locations
Deutzia, Deutzia gracillis, several locations
Deutzia yuki cherry blossom, Deutzia ‘NCDX2’, Entrance gate
Kousa dogwood, Cornus kousa, several locations
(more…)The Flowering Bulbs of Spring
The scientific definition of the beginning of spring occurs with the vernal equinox (March 20). But, locally, we have experienced snowfall on the running of five Boston Marathons (1907, 1908, 1925, 1961, and 1967) and two Boston Red Sox games in Fenway Park were snowed out on April 8th and 10th in 1996. Boston had a half-inch of snow on May 10, 1977. For many of us, the lovely sights of the first flowers opening from bulbs are our own “signs of spring”. Flowering bulbs, corms, and tubers, which are modified perennial, herbaceous plants, are currently coming up in numerous locations, throughout our landscape.
(more…)