April 23: Cottonwood
Apr. 23rd, 2011 09:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
neverspentApril 23:
I made it to the park yesterday for the first time in over a week. One of the storms had knocked down the tops of a couple of giant cottonwood trees. For some reason I've never been around a small, young cottonwood tree; all the ones I see are giant, which means that their tops seem miles away. I've never had the chance to inspect the leafy parts up close.
The leaf shape is very distinctive, kind of a serrated heart. That I knew. And I knew that cottonwoods broadcast their seeds in bits of cottony fluff, hence the name. But I'd never seen where the fluff comes from. Turns out it starts in small green pods which hang from the branches almost like strings of beads. The pods break open from the tip, into four pointed sections which curl back, and out spills the fluff. When a whole string of pods breaks open at once there's quite a pile of fluff.
No wonder when you pass a creek bottom in the spring, and the light is low and bronze, you can see the air filled with floating cotton like soft, soft confetti drifting down. No wonder the sides of the street are piled with white fluff where the breeze catches against the curb.
Edit April 29: I put the seed string pictured above into a plant pot in my apartment, and within a few days it had blossomed and expanded into a large mound of soft fluff. You wouldn't even know that it was once contained by pods! The pods have disappeared.
I made it to the park yesterday for the first time in over a week. One of the storms had knocked down the tops of a couple of giant cottonwood trees. For some reason I've never been around a small, young cottonwood tree; all the ones I see are giant, which means that their tops seem miles away. I've never had the chance to inspect the leafy parts up close.
The leaf shape is very distinctive, kind of a serrated heart. That I knew. And I knew that cottonwoods broadcast their seeds in bits of cottony fluff, hence the name. But I'd never seen where the fluff comes from. Turns out it starts in small green pods which hang from the branches almost like strings of beads. The pods break open from the tip, into four pointed sections which curl back, and out spills the fluff. When a whole string of pods breaks open at once there's quite a pile of fluff.
No wonder when you pass a creek bottom in the spring, and the light is low and bronze, you can see the air filled with floating cotton like soft, soft confetti drifting down. No wonder the sides of the street are piled with white fluff where the breeze catches against the curb.
Edit April 29: I put the seed string pictured above into a plant pot in my apartment, and within a few days it had blossomed and expanded into a large mound of soft fluff. You wouldn't even know that it was once contained by pods! The pods have disappeared.