Honey Locust

What’s happening: Extreme cold has bronzed most of the arborvitaes; some junipers look a desiccated grey.

What’s still green: Evergreens, yuccas, Japanese honeysuckle, pyracantha, grape hyacinth, snapdragon, sea pink, flax, vinca leaves; rose stems.

What’s grey, blue-grey or grey-green: Piñon, four-winged salt bush, snow-in-summer, winterfat, golden hairy aster leaves.

What’s red/turning red: Cholla, prickly pear, beardtongue leaves.

What’s yellow/turning yellow: Globe and weeping willow branches.

What’s blooming inside: Aptenia, zonal geranium.

Animal sightings: Ravens in hay fields yesterday.

Weather: Mornings still very cold; afternoons warming just enough to melt some snow; last snow 12/30/10; 8:37 hours of daylight today.

Weekly update: I rather tend to take trees for granted when I’m driving: they’re green in summer, yellow in fall, and bare in winter. The only time I actually see them is when they disturb that pattern, say when apricots bloom in spring or Russian olives produce grey leaves. After their star turns they step back into the chorus.

I noticed the honey locust down the road after the first snow of the season. Not only did it have dead leaves hanging below a mantle of snow, but those leaves were spotted with dark, curving pods. However, I didn’t see any silhouettes of the very long, sharp, hard thorns that usually sprout from the lower part of the bole.

Gleditsia triacanthos is native to the bottoms and limestone uplands of the Mississippi river valley from the Ohio to the Tennessee where the trees were never the dominant species, but instead grew in open spaces with bur oaks, willows, and American elms. There’s some suspicion native peoples may have expanded their range.

Several Cherokee settlements were called Kulsetsiyi, suggesting they were near honey locust groves. James Mooney heard one tale about a young man who went to the thunder god telling him he was his son. Thunder answered, he had been many places, had many children, and asked him to sit on a blanket of hidden kulsetsi thorns. When he wasn’t harmed, Thunder acknowledged him as a son.

Thunder asked why he had come. The young man said to be cured of skin sores. Thunder’s wife threw him into a pot of boiling water, then tossed him in the river. When he arose cleansed, she warned him to select the meanest snakes to wear and threaten the honey locust when he tired of the ball game he would be forced to play against two of Thunder’s sons. When he started to strike the tree, Thunder stopped the game. The two opponents were young thunders, but the youth was revealed to be lightening.

Mooney doesn’t identify the sores and only says Thunder "put in some roots" into the pot. The most likely skin symptoms that would have sent a man to see a god for help were measles and small pox. Paul Hamel and Mary Chiltoskey were told an infusion of the locust pod had been used for measles, while Linda Taylor heard the neighboring Creek used "sprigs, thorns and branches" in a bath to prevent smallpox."

Anetsa games between settlements, now called la crosse, were preceded by dances around fires made from the wood of a tree struck, but not killed, by lightening, and wood from a honey locust. Charcoal from the tree that had survived a storm was daubed on the dancers the day of the game. On the way to the match, each player joined the shaman down by the river where his skin was pierced by a comb of sharp turkey bones.

When the English arrived, some borrowed the use of the pods’ sweet pulp from the Cherokee. Charred seeds have been recovered from remains of slave quarters of Rich Neck plantation near Williamsburg, probably the unused debris of foraged food. Others tried to absorb the trees into their traditional world: George Washington wanted to use them for a thorn hedge at Mount Vernon and sent two bushels of seed to his overseer from Philadelphia.

With time, the Cherokee were evicted, other species were found for thorny barriers and better sources for sugar became available. The honey locust faded into obscurity, simply another obstacle to clear to open a plantation or farmstead.

After world war II, a new market emerged for small trees that could grow in the new suburban yards. Honey locusts were considered, because their divided leaves allowed enough sun to pass for grass to grow beneath them. However, their other virtues were thought liabilities, until the Siebenthaler Company of Dayton introduced a thornless, sterile cultivar, Moraine, in 1949. William Flemer III marketed Shademaster, the variety sold locally, in 1955, then promoted the legume as a quick growing replacement for the dying American elms which tolerated winter salt and summer air pollution.

Normally honey locusts produce both male and female flowers on different branches of the same tree, or both female and hermaphroditic flowers. The thornless subspecies, inermis, occurs naturally, but rarely. Podless cuttings, often made from male branches or bud wood whose sex has not yet been defined, were used to develop new cultivars which then were commercially reproduced from root cuttings grafted or budded onto the wild species.

Flemer could patent his clone and protect its DNA. He couldn’t control the root stock. Robert Blair says the northern varieties harden off early in the autumn, but that southern ones continue growing and are more likely to suffer from frost damage when moved beyond their range.

The plants that appear in our local hardware often are ones intended for warmer Albuquerque ninety miles to the south and a thousand feet lower. The prices are low and the supplier’s grafting methods are, to be charitable, cost efficient. A great many of their roses revert to their Dr. Huey rootstock, while the roots of most of my trees have sprouted their own trunks.

Some years ago, the people who own the tree that caught my attention planted saplings along the sides of their property. At least the two in front and one immediately behind are honey locusts, though only the one has returned to its ancestors. Blair says that when they’re placed in difficult situations, the branches tend to spread wide, like this tree, as their thick surface roots spread to find water, here in the run off from the pavement.

The owners don’t seem to mind the tree isn’t the one they purchased. It blends anonymously into the scenery where a tree is just a tree, not a source for food or proof of manhood.

Notes:
Blair, Robert M. "Gleditsia triacanthos L. Honeylocust" in Russell M. Burns and Barbara H. Honkala, Silvics of North America, volume 2, 1990.

Franklin, Maria. An Archaeological Study of the Rich Neck Slave Quarter and Enslaved Domestic Life, 2004.

Haworth, Paul Leland. George Washington: Farmer, 2004.
Moerman, Dan. Native American Ethnobotany, 1998; summarizes data from a number of ethnographies, including Paul B. Hamel and Mary U. Chiltoskey, Cherokee Plants and Their Uses -- A 400 Year History, 1975, and Linda Averill Taylor, Plants Used As Curatives by Certain Southeastern Tribes, 1940.
Mooney, James. "The Cherokee Ball Play," The American Anthropologist 3:105-32:1890.

_____. Myths of the Cherokee, 1900.

Neson, Guy. "Honey Locust" fact sheet, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service website; not provide source for suggestion natives expanded the range of the tree.

Photograph: Honey locust growing beside the road, 2 January 2011. The first tree behind is also a honey locust.