trees
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Hedge Apple
The fruits of the Osage Orange are falling. They are sap-sticky and alien-brainy when fresh.
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WTF?
Is it the curse of Backyard and Beyond? Today I walked by the site of the Chinese persimmon I photographed Tuesday and blogged about yesterday. It was gone. Uprooted, like the Billionaire Mayor wants to do to the Occupy Wall Street movement. There was a hole in the soil in the large wooden planter, a…
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Bergen Persimmon
Seen yesterday on Bergen Street, a persimmon. Diospyros kaki. A common name reported by Sibley is “tomato tree” and this un-ripened fruit shows why. The Chinese or Japanese persimmon is obviously native to those parts of the world and is the source of commercial persimmons, a delicacy, I’m told (they don’t travel well). Now, there…
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Nuts! Conkers
The Horse-chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, a native of Eurasia, is a relatively common tree in the city, having long been a popular ornamental. This is its seed, or conker. The Yellow Buckeye, Aesculus flava, meanwhile, is a native of the Ohio River valley and other Appalachian valleys, and is seen much less frequently in the city.…
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Nuts! Beechnuts
General Anthony C. McAuliffe Week continues….We have two kinds of beech trees, genus Fagus, in our midst: the European F. sylvatica and the American F. grandifloria, with numerous cultivars, including cut-leaf and copper, and several subspecies to mix it up even further. Sylvatica was often planted in parks, where the smooth gray bark attracts the…
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Nuts! Acorns
We’re going nuts this week to celebrate summer’s ferocious growth spurt, which channels energy into storage systems we call seeds and/or nuts. Botanically, true nuts are produced by, among others, oak, beech, chestnut — but not horse-chestnut — alder, hazel, and hornbeam species, but we’ll be a little looser here, since any one of the…
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Osage Orange
“Don’t sit under the Osage Orange with anybody else but me.” Maclura pomifera, a.k.a. bois d’arc, bodark, hedge-apple. There are several in Prospect Park, but this one in the Nethermead is the park’s finest example. It should be dropping its cargo of softball-sized fruits any second now. Folk belief has these “apples” used to scare…
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Weekend Naturalist
Through the Naturalists’ Gate at 77th Street, past the enormous head of the great geographer Alexander von and under the eagle eye of this AMNH topper I entered the Central Park and rambled in the Ramble in search of the barred owl that had been reported yesterday. The owl remained with Minerva, although the local…
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Fruiting Body
The natural world erupts into my consciousness — sight, sound, smell — the key is observation, a practice especially challenging in the hyperactive, sense-whelming city. Here I am planning to cross a highway on-ramp while not being run over, dodging masses of pigeon droppings under an overpass, noticing a fruit on the sidewalk. Looking up.…
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Goldenish Rainy Treethingie
Argh! Tree names! Enough to drive you crazy. The NYC Parks Dept.’s badass-streets-approved Goldenraintree (draught, salt, high pH, poor soils) is Sibley’s Golden Rain-tree (a/k/a Shower Tree, Pride of India, Varnish Tree, Gate Tree), which is not to be confused with Common Laburnum, (a/k/a Golden Chain-tree, Golden Rain Tree). Anyway, Koelreuteria paniculata is blooming now,…
Backyard and Beyond 