Trees worth a second look

American Forests, Wntr, 2005 by Ketzel Levine

National Public Radio reporter Ketzel Levine, known as the Doyenne of Dirt, covers everything from Big Trees to the Westminster Dog Show. This excerpt is from her book Plant This!--100 "best bets for year-round gorgeous gardens." c2000 by Ketzel Levine. All rights reserved. Excerpted from Plant This! by permission of Sasquatch Books. The illustrations by Rene Eisenbart are from The Oregonian c1997 and 1998, Oregonian Publishing Co. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

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OXYDENDRUM ARBOREUM

I'm just back from walking--or should I say flying?--through Portland's Hoyt Arboretum. What might have been a leisurely stroll became a forced march, thanks to the hopped-up beagle pulling on the lead (he was a new model, not yet broken in). I had gone to Hoyt to see a sourwood tree, which I was told I would find on the Wildwood Trail.

So five minutes into the walk, doing a fast scan across all manner of leafy greens, I find myself thinking, "Yeah, right, how am I going to find a couple of lousy trees in the middle of all this generic vegetation? I snickered at my own smug confidence, thinking I knew enough about plant ID to spot Oxydendrum arboreum at a few hundred paces.

By the time I got to the intersection of the Wildwood and Cherry trails, young Jimmy had just about freed my arm from its socket. I cursed myself for not bringing along a good tree book. I was ready to about-face and let him drag me home when I noticed an imposing shape in the distance. My nagging self shut up fast once we'd confirmed it was an oxydendrum, a tree too poised and polished to overlook, even in the most like-minded crowd.

The fall color hadn't quite happened yet, but the tree's leathery, slightly glossy foliage was infused with enough mahogany to suggest what would soon follow: wine-red notes lightened by the tinkling of pink and lavender with a sporadic smattering of yellow. All this plus summer's leftover flower stems at the end of each branch, French-polished fingernails set off by ruffle-sleeved leaves.

Though no two O. arboreum specimens are precisely alike--in fact, their irregularity is a given--this tree had two straight, lean trunks offset by arms of downward-curving foliage. All the better to set off the spent flower fingers, which reached down, then up at the tips. The entire plant was in motion even while still, reminiscent of Pieris japonica covered in its spring filigree. (I used to think of the sourwood as pieris-on-a-stick.)

All sourwoods are extremely slow-growing, that is, a foot a year. Though they are capable of becoming several stories tall, it's likely you'll have moved before that happens. Still, whether as street trees or garden specimens, their formal shape and forgiving manner make them exceptional plants even when young, asking only sun, good soil, and supplemental summer water to flower heavily in summer and blush brilliantly in fall.

I managed about fifteen minutes of note-taking before my higher-maintenance companion heard the fast-approaching clink of dog tags. We were off like a shot. By then, the wind had picked up, the sky had darkened, and the season was falling fast around me. As we whizzed back to the car, we passed a trio of sourwoods I'd completely missed on our way in. But that was when I'd been distracted by my own chatter, instead of letting the tree speak for itself.

PISTACIA CHINENSIS

Plant hunter Ernest Henry Wilson--better known as E.H.--was on his third trip to China when he came across Pistacia chinensis. It wasn't exactly high on his list. About that same time in 1908, he'd received appalling news from his benefactor, the Arnold Arboretum: The 18,000 lily bulbs he'd shipped from Ichang to Boston had rotted en route.

"Knocked all of a heap" by the news, Wilson seems to have made a quick recovery, and set about digging up and sending back 25,000 more (no comment). He also continued the work that made him famous--introducing astonishing new plants from the Far East--conquests that had so far included Acer griseum, the paperbark maple, and Kolkwitzia amabilis, the beautybush. This trip he bagged the Chinese pistache.

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It's possible E.H. had already seen a rare specimen of pistacia growing at Kew Gardens, or perhaps his first glimpse of the plant came in the wild. In either case, having witnessed its wondrous fall color, you better believe he snatched seed and sent it home.

P. chinensis is a member of the family Anacardiaceae, which includes the smoke tree, Cotinus, and the sumac, Rhus. Not a bad pedigree if you're looking for a heart-stopping autumnal blaze. What makes this tree particularly valuable in my Northwest neck of the woods is that it doesn't need cold temperatures to trip its trigger, and will turn kaleidoscopic colors despite prolonged heat and a dearth of summer rain (ordinarily, a parched August/September will wreak havoc with fall color).

In addition to its showy, sumaclike plumage, the Chinese pistache is a superb choice for tough urban sites. It'll stand up to pollution, drought, lousy soil, or restricted root space and still grow into an impressive, spreading, 20- to 35-foot tree (capable of 50 feet). Its spring flowers aren't much, but the peppercorn-sized fruits on the female trees can be showy, maturing from yellow to red to metallic blue if they haven't first gone to the birds. You wouldn't want to eat them anyway, since this is not the edible pistachio tree (though P. chinensis is used as an understock for growing P. vera, the real nut).