Tree of the Week

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Good morning. After a week of anxiety, argument, and a disturbing amount of anger in the comment section (what’s up with that?), we bring your our cheerfully off-topic Saturday morning special, Tree of the Week. We feel a little bit like Florence Henderson serving Rice Krispy treats in the prison yard at San Quentin.

This week our tree-loving friend Pieter Severynen warns us of us the evils of Tree-of-Heaven:

Tree-of-Heaven – Ailanthus altissima

Beware what you wish for; it might come true. In 1751 French missionary Pierre d’Incarville, who was working in China, sent seeds of a beautiful tree to France. The royal physician to Louis XVI received some of the seeds and planted them in his Paris garden. There, American William Hamilton saw the rare tree from China, obtained its seeds and planted them in his Philadelphia estate garden in 1784. From there it spread first all over the East Coast, then across the country; it invaded California’s Gold Rush country in the 1800s.

Invariably people admired the tree for its desirable qualities, they planted it by the thousands as an ideal street and garden tree; it was only later that they learned of its numerous faults. On the one hand the tree of heaven is a beautiful, lush, fast growing deciduous tree with handsome flowers and winged seedpods; it thrives where few other trees would, taking poor soil, drought, heat, cold, dust and polluted air. On the other hand, once established it aggressively overwhelms any nearby area through suckers and seeds, it supplants the native vegetation, and it is very difficult to eradicate. We now see patches of young trees along many of our freeways. It is the only tree to make the “Terrible Ten’ list of invasive plants in Southern California (see www.weedwatch.org). A fast-growing deciduous tree to 50’ x 50’ with a smooth gray bark, it has two-to-three-feet-long leaves that are divided into 25 or more 3-inch to 5-inch-long leaflets. Reddish male flowers plumes are smelly, the greenish female flowers are followed by brown seedpods in fall. Admire the tree’s beauty, but don’t plant it if you want to be kind to our environment.

Thanks, Pieter
Email Pieter: plseve@earthlink.net
Photo credit: www.americanpie.org