Male Cottonwood

What’s blooming in the area: Cottonwood, chokecherry, wisteria, tulips, iris, tansy and purple mustards, hoary cress, alyssum simplex, western stickseed, cryptantha, mossy phlox, golden smoke, blue flax, oxalis, alfilerillo, dandelion, three-awn and cheat grass; buds on fern-leaf globemallow and June grass.

What’s coming out: Virginia creeper, scurf pea, ragweed.

What’s blooming in my yard: Sour cherry, purple-leaved and western sand cherries, lilac, forsythia, daffodil, grape hyacinth, baby blue iris, yellow alyssum; buds on spirea and peony.

What’s coming out: Lady Banks rose, Russian sage, sweet pea.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia.

Animal sightings: Hummingbird, gecko, bees on Siberian pea, small red and large black ants.

Weather: Days too warm followed by winds and temperatures below freezing yesterday morning; last snow 04/30/09; 13:38 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: Male animals like robins and peacocks have the more colorful plumage, but among plants it’s usually the female who has the grander flowers to attract a pollinator. An exception is the wind fertilized cottonwood. This time of year, the catkins on the female are green, while those on the male are deep maroon.

Buds form in summer in the axils where leaves attach to twigs on their tips, and winter over, protected by a layer of resin. A month ago, the flower buds began expanding into glistening layers of rouged green scales.

Two weeks ago, flowering stalks began emerging from the scales, much like cigars from tobacco-stained ivory holders. By last weekend, the outer scales were hardening and beginning to fall to the ground where they looked like discarded nutshells, too sticky to pick up.

The tongue of flowers that falls from the scale beak begins as a cluster of dark red berries that, in fact, are collections of 40 to 60 stamens attached to a disk. As the pollen blows away, the remaining skeletons dry purple.

Female flowers usually appear a week later. The male’s whitish-green stalk continues to lengthen and new flowers appear from the maw. By the time the threads of dried heads reach three inches, the leaves will begin to appear and the pendents will fall.

Catkins of both sexes are difficult to see because they tend to emerge high in the crown after a tree is at least eight years old. The one adds to the green aura surrounding the high branches, while the other resembles a triangular dreamcatcher against the sky.

The irony is that, despite the greater color of the male, it’s the female people notice because the cottony seeds land on top of dead flowers sitting on top of sticky scales on top of last year’s leaves. However, it’s the male that’s been sacrificed to produce the cottonless cottonwood sold by the local hardware.

Siouxland was released in 1955 as a clone of a single tree researchers at South Dakota State University found in a trail plot where they were testing plants for rust resistance. At the time, they believed it was a selection of Populus deltoides, the parent species of the local wislizeni subspecies. Now they think it was the sterile offspring of a canadensis hybrid, itself a spontaneous cross of the eastern cottonwood with a black cottonwood (Populus nigra) that occurred in Europe when the American tree was taken there in the 1600's.

Cottonwoods naturally interbreed and tend to be used interchangeably. When people talk about folk uses of the cottonwood buds, they rarely specify the bud type or species. When they do, it seems they mention the most familiar. Thus, it’s resin from the leaf bud the Karok use to attach feathers to arrow shafts and "gummy leaf buds" the Cheyenne and Omaha use for dye, while local Spanish-speaking settlers ate the "young green pods of the female cottonwood."

The only people who make it clear they use male flowers are the local dyers who say they gather purple catkins and boil them for an hour. Alas, the colors they produce with their mordants are the colors of the leaves, not the flowers: chrome produces something between yellow-green and dull gold, while tin makes gray-green and alum makes yellow.

All the masculine glory of spring has been replaced by the neutered Siouxland that last weekend was quietly opening its leaves, while the male down the road was parading and pollinating unseen by drivers below.

Notes:
Curtin, Leonora Scott Muse. Healing Herbs of the Upper Rio Grande, 1947, republished 1997, with revisions by Michael Moore.

Demeritt, Jr., Maurice E. "Populus L.," in USDA Forest Service, Silvics of North America. Volume 2: Hardwoods, 1990.

Las Arañas Spinners and Weavers Guild, Inc. Dying with Natural Materials, 2004 edition of Vegetable Dyes of New Mexico, 1970, prepared by Jodie Aves and Janislee Wiese.

Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998, summarizes data from a number of ethnographies including C. Hart Merriam, Ethnographic Notes on California Indian Tribes, 1966; Jeffrey A. Hart, "The Ethnobotany of the Northern Cheyenne Indians of Montana," Journal of Ethnopharmacology 4:1-55:1981, and Melvin R. Gilmore, "A Study in the Ethnobotany of the Omaha Indians," Nebraska State Historical Society Collections 17:314-57:1913. The Karok used Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa, the Cheyenne used Populus deltoides and the Omaha used Populus deltoides ssp. monilifera.

USDA, Soil Conservation Service. Conservation Tree and Shrub Cultivars in the United States, 1991.

Photograph: Male catkins on a cottonwood growing upland from the near arroyo, 25 April 2010.