Sourwood

The dried five-part fruits of Oxydendrum arboreum, fallen from the tree.

This is a great tree for fall colors, both the leaves and the fruits. One guide I have says its range is from NJ south. There are a couple young ones in the Native Flora Garden at NYBG and a stellar oldster in the nearby Rock Garden. There’s a magnificent specimen in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Eight are mapped on the Chaya & Barnard Central Park Entire. But does anybody have this clearly southern tree in their non-park woods around here?

While the tree’s common name suggests its unpalatability — for people who chew leaves — the honey that bees make from its flowers is supposed to be transporting. I don’t recall ever having any.

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Part of our problem is that the Democrats are deeply mired in a corrupt system. The governor of my state, for instance, is sometimes touted as a 2020 Democratic contender. Andrew Cuomo shares funders with Trump: Paulson, Mnuchin, Icahn, Viola. In the past, various Trumps have given him money, too. Cuomo very much represents the Democrat style: he advertises a liberal social agenda while, sotto voce, carries on the neoliberal economic model. The end result of that model, the subservience of democracy to wealth, will inevitably result in only the rich being able to enjoy the expanded rights he claims he supports.