Have you ever heard of Yellowwood? I hope so, but if not, you are in for a treat. It’s a strikingly beautiful tree that offers us lessons in resilience and keeping on despite adversity. Yellowwood (Cladrastiskentukea) is native to the eastern US, but its discovery by the horticulture community was noted by the likes of French aristocrats and American founding fathers. Join me in celebrating the beauty and rarity of a tree that should be far better known.
What we cover in this episode:
- The French plant hunter who discovered yellowwood
- What makes it yellow
- Why isn’t it planted in every garden
- What yellowwood can teach us
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Transcript:
What were the odds, in 1796, that the son of a farmer from Satori, France, would be standing in the snow 12 miles from Fort Blount in Tennessee? Not just that, this man was looking at a tree that had never before been identified by the scientific community.
Well, you know, maybe those odds weren’t so very long, since the farm that he grew up on was a royal farm near Versailles. And finding and sending back trees like this was exactly what Louis XVI had commissioned him to do.
But Louis had been executed in 1793, and these days, André Michaud was funding his own expedition. And on this snowy stretch of wilderness near the Cumberland River, André had found a tree that he assumed to be a new kind of Sophora. It was the end of February, and no leaves or flowers had yet emerged on his new tree.
Captain Williams, an officer stationed at Fort Blount, had some of the trees cut for André, who was able to find some seeds on the branches and collect them, and also some roots to take back to plant at his plantation near Charleston, South Carolina. Later, André’s son Francois would ship seed to France, and it’s possible that some of that batch of seed was planted in the Tuileries Garden in Paris.
So what tree had André Michaud found on that snowy stretch of Tennessee countryside in 1796? It was Yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea.
You’re listening to Plant Connection. Life today can feel overwhelming, like we’ve drifted away from its natural rhythm. This podcast is your space to slow down, breathe, and rediscover the peace and clarity that come from reconnecting with the natural world.
I’m your host, Lisa Cutshaw. Let’s reconnect, one plant at a time.
Okay, so given that André thought this tree was a member of the Sephora genus, my plant geeks out there probably already have a picture in mind.
Small, multi-trunk tree with showy flowers, right? You’re pretty close, but scale it up. Yellowwood is a medium tree, 30 to 50 feet tall, and in the right conditions, up to 70 feet.
In addition to sending seeds to Paris, there’s a good chance that André’s son, François, also sent seeds to William Bartram in Philadelphia around 1800.
Bartram was one of the preeminent U.S. botanists of the time, and the yellowwood in Bartram’s garden has been tended with care for over 200 years, even after it was struck by lightning in 2010.
I wonder what they actually called the tree when it was planted at the Michaud Plantation, or at Bartram’s home. You see, it didn’t get a scientific name until 1822, and it didn’t get its current scientific genus until 1824, decades after André Michaud’s death.
The man who named it, Constantin Rafinesque, described the scent of the flowers as stronger than locust and more like orange flowers, and he noted that the roots could be used to create citron-colored dye. And it’s possible that Rafinesque sent seeds of yellowwood to Thomas Jefferson, so folks who were finding it were recognizing that it was something to take note of.
So let me step back and reiterate just how beautiful this tree is.
It tends to have a multi-stem trunk, dividing low on the trunk, and it reaches toward the sky in a vase-shaped form. The leaves are compound, and they create a lovely backdrop for the cascades of white flowers that arrive in June. Think of something like white wisteria, and you’re not so far off from what the flowers look like, and they carry a lovely fruity scent.
Come autumn, the leaves turn a brilliant yellow. So is that where we get the common name of yellowwood? Nope, that comes from the brilliant yellow color of the heartwood. Remember the dye you can make from the roots? It’s all part of the same coloring that does, indeed, mean that the wood itself is yellow.
So why, you might ask, is this tree not more commonly known if it’s so beautiful? I mean, it’s a great question. You’d think that nurseries would be selling out of this gorgeous tree left and right. And for my part, I think it should be. I think it’s criminally overlooked.
One thing that might be considered a weakness is the tendency of limbs to break in harsh conditions, like ice storms. Is that true? Sure.
It’s also true that the tree has a remarkable ability to rebound after injury. It won’t regrow the same limb, but it can survive and continue to thrive. Yellowwood is native to the eastern U.S. from roughly Illinois, south to Alabama, and Georgia.
Within that range, though, it’s relatively rare in the wild. The native populations in Indiana were identified in the 1930s by people working for the Civilian Conservation Corps. At that point, they were working in a steep ravine, and the trees were kind of hidden from view if you weren’t in the ravine.
So these were sort of remnant populations that they were discovering. Yellowwood State Forest was planted by the CCC and the WPA to rehabilitate 2,000 acres of eroded land. So this was all part of a Great Depression-era government project.
So not only is it relatively unknown to the general public, it’s also rare in the wild. A tree that is beautiful in every season, doing its thing whether others notice or not, and letting life prune away whatever’s necessary while continuing to thrive.
One place where Yellowwood is definitely remembered is Tennessee, where the Jackson County Historical Society lobbied for Yellowwood to be named Tennessee’s Bicentennial Tree, and that resolution was signed in 1991.
In 1996, 200 years after Michaud had discovered the tree in what would become Jackson County, the Society presented the Governor and the Speakers of the State House and Senate with gavels made of Yellowwood.
Now if you would like a Yellowwood for your own garden, I don’t think it will come as any surprise that I will cheer you on in that endeavor. Do it. Plant Yellowwood if you can, and nurture it. You won’t regret it.
Besides being beautiful, Yellowwood is also pretty tough. It can handle a wide range of soil pH, and it’s able to tolerate urban conditions. There are several named varieties out there, one of which even has pink flowers instead of the usual white. That one is named Perkins Pink, and it was discovered in the 1930s on the grounds of the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, Massachusetts.
So when we come to the question of why is Yellowwood not better known, I really don’t have a good answer for that. It’s not because the people who love it don’t put it out there. It was voted Urban Tree of the Year in 2015, so people do, you know, those in the know recognize it for what it is.
I just hope that more of us will come to love it. I have to say, and I’ve said it before, that doing the research for these episodes often brings up information that really surprises me. I had no idea that Yellowwood was found by Michaux, and that he had come specifically from France to try to find wonderful trees to send back for basically replanting the French forests.
This isn’t the first of the plants that I’ve started out to research thinking, oh, this isn’t a very well-known plant at all, I probably won’t be able to find anything, and come to find out, yes, indeed, there is a lot to find. So, I see it as a great privilege to keep doing this, and an opportunity for myself to keep learning.
And if you’re looking for an emblem of being true to yourself, recognition be damned, with the strength to accept for the pruning that life dictates, Yellowwood is a great candidate.
I think I’ll head out this week and see if I can find any of those distinctive yellow leaves still hanging on.
See you outside.
Thank you for joining me on this journey back to nature with Plant Connection.
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