Events Calendar
In This Section
Deadline is Friday for list of area Lenten fish fries
Hoppin' Frog on list of world's top brewers
Sugar cookies are sweet, easy treat
Q.: I have a cookie recipe that calls for c...
Trifecta of celebrations in February
Sparkling wine best when chilled|
Dessert toppings double as dips
Most Read Stories
Man robbed at Tallmadge Avenue eatery
Another winter punch heading toward Ohio
Four teens restrain man, take items from his Akron home
Complaints against officer keep coming
Police: Ohio girl dies after fall into snow bank
Region makes way for latest batch of snow; cancellations rise
Cuyahoga Falls residents come home to find burning couch on balcony
Blogs:
First Bell - On Education:
No City of Akron basketball tonight
Pets:
Pet telethon re-airs
The Heldenfiles:
Chipmunks "Squeakquel" on DVD/BD March 30
Akron Zips:
Late surge gives Zips ugly road win
Tribe Matters:
Blogmail response on Hafner
Cleveland Browns:
Stallworth's contract terminated
Balanced Ledger:
QB in Browns future: another mock draft
Kent State Sports:
KSU Notes – February 9
Cleveland Cavaliers:
NBA Power Rankings from Around the Internet
Buckeye Blogging:
Buckeyes grab 18 players on signing day
Varsity Letters:
Garfield at Buchtel basketball
All Da King's Men:
Palin At The Tea Party Convention
Blog of Mass Destruction:
Republican Pre-Conditions
Akron Law Café:
Citizens United v. F.E.C. (Part 4): Kennedy's and O'Connor's Basic Approaches to Constitutional Decisionmaking – Top Down and Bottom Up
Car Chase:
Collector Car Hobby Loses One of the Best—Jim Roll
Let's Talk Real Estate:
Decisions Decisions: Credit Cards or Your Mortgage?
Ohio Travels with Betty:
Loucile is looking for a Lake Erie getaway in June for three kids, ages 1, 3, and 5.
Sound Check:
Talk of the Town – Top entertainment picks for the weekend
HRLite House:
OFCCP Report
Akron Gamer:
Makers of 'Castle Crashers' unveil 'BattleBlock Theater'
See Jane Style:
Do IT this week: Layering
Charming trees feature blooms in lovely lemon yellow, white
By Jim Chatfield
Special to the Beacon Journal
Published on Saturday, Jul 25, 2009
We may never have as pleasant a June and July as in this fine summer of '09. Unless, of course, you run a swimming pool. The verdict is still out and dog days of August may make us forget these cool, breezy evenings, but what sleeping weather we have had, what incomparable walking weather. We were beginning to run a bit dry the past few weeks, but this has passed with recent rains.
Alec Cusnow once said that ''the lawn is the canvas upon which the rest of the landscape is painted.'' Let's take a look with two questions Plant Lovers' Almanac readers had about that ''rest of the story.''
Q: What is that lovely rounded tree full of lemon-yellow flower spikes?
A: Ask Elizabeth Taylor. In the middle of the swamp, there lives a tree — in Raintree County, ''which had no boundaries in time and space, where lurked musical and strange names and mythical and lost peoples, and which was itself only a name musical and strange.''
The golden raintree (Koelreuteria paniculata) you saw blooming recently is real and is a neat specimen tree for Northeast Ohio, sometimes also used as a street tree, though considered too messy by many once the papery fruits brown up. The golden flowers are lovely, though the legend that all fall in love who sit beneath the tree where golden blossoms fall is probably only Hollywood legend.
Golden Raintree was a 1948 novel by Ross Lockridge Jr., and a 1957 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, Eva Marie Saint and Rod Taylor. It is a story of a professor in Civil War Indiana falling in love amid times of turmoil.
As for the tree, golden raintree is medium-size, growing to about 30-40 feet over the years, with those lovely sunny yellow flower panicles. The form is densely rounded. It has good drought, alkaline soil and pollution tolerance, and grows in both swamps and urban sites. It blooms in July, but the September cultivar blooms on Labor Day.
Q: Is Cleveland Select Callery pear a suitable street tree for Ohio?
A: Callery pears have a number of excellent qualities: attractive white flowers, glossy green leaves and good fall color. They are widely planted in central Ohio and throughout the Midwest and eastern United States as street trees.
The Bradford cultivar of Callery pear was once touted as a great option for community forests, but has developed a reputation of having a major problem with breakage in storms because of its branch structure.
Cleveland Select is one of several alternative cultivars that have better branch structure and greater acceptance by arborists. It is widely planted throughout Ohio. It has the aforementioned attractive foliage and flower features, and a good insect and disease profile. We do see some fireblight disease, a touch of powdery mildew, pear blister mite and a few others, but overall disease and pest resistance is a good feature.
Now for the negatives. Some feel Callery pears are overplanted. When there is little species diversity in an urban forest, the possibility of a major new disease or insect outbreak being widely devastating if it occurs increases. Dutch elm disease and emerald ash borer are examples of why we would like to see more diversity, say 10 percent or less of a given species in a particular community.
Second, there is some developing concern about Callery pear as an invasive species. When Bradford Callery pear was introduced, one of its attributes as a street tree was that it had few if any fruits (desirable for a street tree since it means less mess). Callery pears have a small inedible brown fruit. Bradford had no to few fruits because of self-incompatibility genes.
However, over time, with introduction of new cultivars that originated from mutations, including Cleveland Select, Aristocrat, Autumn Blaze and others, Callery pears are now crossing. This leads to more fruit, more mess and more importantly more pears (which have an Asian origin) showing up where they were not planted, spread by birds. Some feel this threatens natural areas even when pears are planted in urban sites; others feel this is unlikely.
How can we know whether Callery pears will become an invasive species? It is a puzzle, but I appreciate the words of Kim Todd in Tinkering With Eden:
''So we should do what we can, take actions that make the most sense to us given our present understanding, proceed with caution, work to expand our peripheral vision so it takes in more species and unglimpsed possibilities, reach to see beyond the effects we hope to achieve. We should also rest assured that in the half-light at the end of the working day, no matter how we open our eyes and how finely we tune our fortune-telling instruments, no matter how many times we recheck the calculations and stretch to account for the Earth complete and entire, the natural world will continue to rattle, buck, elude, and astonish us, serving up results far beyond the imagination.''
Jim Chatfield is a horticultural educator with Ohio State University Extension. Write: Plant Lovers' Almanac, Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640. Include your phone number.
We may never have as pleasant a June and July as in this fine summer of '09. Unless, of course, you run a swimming pool. The verdict is still out and dog days of August may make us forget these cool, breezy evenings, but what sleeping weather we have had, what incomparable walking weather. We were beginning to run a bit dry the past few weeks, but this has passed with recent rains.
Get the full article here.
Comments
Click here to post your comments
