Carpet and canopy

As a kid, I'd spend hours scrunched down looking for stuff on the ground, and I remain particularly obsessed with pinecones and horse chestnuts. Today the woods near the edge of Nellie's Lawn yielded both. Looks like a squirrel got tired and gave up on this tough snack.

Child and I sacked out on the grass to break up our bicycle ascent of the Dreaded Hill; our rest in the shade on this Very Last Day of Summer Vacation stretched to an hour of golden afternoon. (Poor public-school kids had to go back today; Catholic schools got one extra day and it was a beaut.) The lawn had been mown recently and smelt heavenly, like sweet hay and clover. And plantains too, I guess. 

Across the meadow, one tree towered above its fellows. It is a tulip tree, and they are famous for growing tall (up to 200 feet) and straight. A member of the magnolia family, they bear creamy-yellow tulip-like flowers in spring (usually borne way too high for anyone but birds to see them).  Their wood is light and workable (once favored for making dugout canoes), and their flowers literally drip with nectar for honeybees. Members of this garden forum disagreed on the tulip's merits, however, with some treasuring their towering specimens and others calling it a "trash tree," with branches prone to falling down in storms.

Looking up the trunk of this tulip made me dizzy. On one side, a massive scar culminates in a deep dark cavity.

My interest in Liriodendron tulipifera is more than academic: Our garden, in an unplanned pregnancy, has given birth to a baby tulip tree (perhaps the windborne progeny of this park giant). The sapling, left, is growing at an alarming rate, and we wish to place it up for adoption. (Surely it could be recruited for the army of one million trees we're promised!) If we wait much longer, we'll need to lift a rootball the size of a Hummer. I'll deliver and plant it for free anywhere in Brooklyn. Would anyone care to invest in a dugout canoe for their grandkids?

Comments

[M.Thew]

Your readers may be interested in knowing that that tulip tree is known on the old tree survey map of the park (put out by the Greensward Foundaton/Friends of Prospect Park; my 2nd ed. is 1990) as Elizabeth's Tulip Tree. Who was Elizabeth? Why it's not "Nellie's Tulip Tree" I don't know. Maybe Nellie, who supposedly pined away for love in the lawn, was pining for Elizabeth. That would put a spin on the Victorians...

As one of the tallest trees in the park, it is an excellent place to see red tailed hawks perching throughout the leafless months. Also, that green fruit chewed by Screwy Squirrel looks like a black walnut from here. The greeny-yellow covering stains something horrible and used to be used as dye.

[Brenda from Flatbush]

Faskinatin'! I'll be on the lookout for hawks. There is an "Elizabeth" magnolia cultivar named after the BBG's director Elizabeth Scholtz, but I don't see a connection here. As for the black walnut, I'll bet you're right, horse chestnuts are larger. My aunt had a black walnut tree and would crack the nuts by driving back and forth over them with her car.