Imagine the Potential: Twigs From Twiggy or Greenery From Al Green
Celebrity Foliage Bureau: Just what every home should have: a country music singer or dead president growing in the backyard. Sound too good to be true? Not anymore. Thanks to a conservation organization called American Forests, it’s now possible to plant a piece of your favorite celebrity in the lawn--in the form of a tree that is directly descended from timber owned by that person.
Imagine watching the Oak Ridge Boys change colors every fall. Or snoozing on a hammock strung between Napoleon and Grover Cleveland.
All you have to do is send $35 to American Forests, a nonprofit group that collects seeds from historic trees and then raises them to infancy in a Jacksonville, Fla., greenhouse. Each seedling comes with a fertilizer tablet, bird-safety net and certificate of authenticity.
The offerings include an Edgar Allan Poe hackberry (raven sold separately), a Lyndon B. Johnson pecan, an Elvis Presley sweet gum (it’s a trunka trunka burnin’ love), a George Washington tulip poplar (sorry, no cherry trees), an Orville and Wilbur Wright red cedar (we like to picture it with the top branches sheared off), a Martin Luther King Jr. oak, and an Amelia Earhart sugar maple with “propeller-like seeds” (we ordered one, but it mysteriously vanished in shipping).
Also available is a country music collection that features a Loretta Lynn sycamore, Charlie Daniels red oak and Trisha Yearwood dogwood. “Now you can plant your favorite country artist’s tree in your yard and create a special kinship with the artist,” declares a recent ad.
But the most bizarre plants are the moon sycamore (from seeds taken to the moon aboard Apollo 14), the Hippocratic Oath tree from Greece (available only if you have a referral from your primary-care tree), the Stonewall Jackson wilderness Kentucky coffee tree (descended from a plant that marks the grave of the Confederate general’s amputated arm) and the Texas hanging oak (which was used to administer frontier justice in Goliad, Texas).
There’s also “the tree that owns itself.” In 1820, an Athens, Ga., man willed a small parcel of land to a white oak tree.
Future seedlings could include offspring from trees at various U.S. colleges.
However, we’re holding out for a Tammy Faye Bakker weeping willow (complete with mascara running down the trunk) or an Al Gore live oak (seedlings harvested directly from the vice president).
For a catalog, call (800) 320-TREE or visit American Forests’ Web site at https://www.oldtrees.org/.
Alarming Trends Bureau: A group that wants to legalize marijuana kicked off a national advertising blitz in San Francisco last week with bus-stop billboards that say: “Honk if you inhale.”
Maybe they should team up with American Forests to offer a Jerry Garcia cannabis plant, complete with fertilizer, bird-safety net and a certificate of authenticity that doubles as rolling paper.
Best Supermarket Tabloid Story: We interrupt today’s weird tabloid headline to bring you a real-life story that outdoes fiction: “British Teenager Killed by Chewing Her Own Hair.”
According to the London Telegraph, doctors found a hairball “the size of a rugby ball” inside the 17-year-old London girl’s stomach.
Unpaid Informants: A.J. Flick, Music City News, San Francisco Chronicle, Reuters, Tom Gilbert, Carolyn Kimball, Mike Faneuff. Off-Kilter’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com. Off-Kilter runs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This column is printed on paper made from Leo Tolstoy white birch trees.
