Golden Chain Tree

Day 235: This is a Golden Chain Tree (Laburnum), not to be confused with Golden Rain Tree (Koelreuteria). It is part of the Family Fabaceae (legumes), not Sapindaceae (soapberry), placing it in the same botanical "box" as peas and Scotch broom as opposed to the one containing horse chestnuts and lychee. Now, have we got this straight? Stop calling Golden Chain Tree by the wrong name! Mine happens to be a weeping variety with droopy branches as well as dangly inflorescences, and it was one of my "must-have" plants for my yard. It took me a decade or more to find one I could afford, and the contortions we went through to arrange transportation from the nursery where I bought it on a fall close-out sale were hilarious. It was in an enormous pot, for one thing, and given the size of the pot and the height of the tree, the distance between the footwell in front of the passenger seat of my car and the back window meant that we had to carefully bend the top of the tree to get it inside. There wasn't much room for me in there as I drove it home with leaves tickling my ears, only to face the challenge of manipulating the pot (heavy!) out of the car and over to the "$200" hole I'd dug for my $20 tree. That was my father's advice showing: whatever you paid for the plant, dig a hole worth ten times the amount to plant it in. Okay, the rich soil I bedded it in didn't actually cost $200, but there should be bonus points for backache. My hard work paid off. My lovely Laburnum is now covered in pendent golden chains.

Golden Chain

Day 247: The Golden Chain Tree is in bloom. This was one of the items on my priority list when I bought my home over thirty years ago, but I had trouble finding one I felt I could afford. Most of what was available came in huge pots, so large that I knew I couldn't get one into my car or, more importantly, get it back out again and to the spot where I wanted to plant it. Then one day as I was nosing around in one of my favourite garden stores, I came across a weeping variety at a reasonable price. Big pot or not, the tree just fit in the back of my car with the branches filling the passenger seat and only slightly bent down against the front windshield. It was something of a challenge to heft the pot out the rear hatch and roll it into place. My father had insisted that if you bought a $5 tree, you should put it in a "$50 hole" to ensure its survival, so I set to digging and filling, using store-bought garden soil to bed it in. Daddy's wisdom paid off. It's still not very tall, but it blooms reliably, and the weeping habit enhances the effect of the golden chains of pea-shaped flowers which give this Laburnum its common name.

Leaves

Day 309: Here's a quick lesson in basic botany, presented in the form of a visual quiz. Don't worry, you won't be graded on your response.

We talk about leaves in many ways, throwing around words like "serrulate" and "runcinate" to describe their margins, referring to their tips as "cirrose," "aristate" and so on, "obelliptic" and "flabellate" for their shapes, but in the most elementary terms, leaves can be placed in one of two categories: simple or compound. A simple leaf is just that: it has a central vein and if it is lobed (think of an oak leaf), the most deeply cut portion of the lobes do not reach the central vein. It is generally attached to the main stem of the plant by a petiole (stalk). Please note that I said "generally." Sessile (stalkless) forms do occur. A compound leaf is made up of multiple leaflets arising from a single petiole, and compound leaves can be palmate (shaped like a hand) or pinnate (resembling a feather).

I promised you a quick lesson, so I won't go any further down the rabbit hole than this. From left to right, top row: 1) Golden Chain Tree, 2) Red Alder, 3) Sitka Mountain-ash; bottom row: 4) Vine Maple, 5) Philadelphus, 6) Horse Chestnut. Categorize these six leaves as follows: simple, palmately compound, pinnately compound.

And there. You learned a couple of new words in a relatively painless manner.

Answers: elpmis, evif, ruof, owt; dnuopmoc yletamlap, xis dna eno; dnuopmoc yletannip, eerht.

Goldie

Day 239: Two years ago, I bought a weeping Golden Chain Tree for my front yard. Last year, it produced a few chains, still getting settled into its new home, and this year, it has rewarded me with a lavish display of cascading yellow flowers. I've actually been pleasantly surprised by the growth rate of many of my landscaping trees. Harry Lauder (the contorted filbert) arrived here as a 16-inch twig and has now developed into a 10' x 10' bush. A spindly foot-tall Japanese red maple now towers 12' above my driveway, and a sickly 8' Mountain Ash survived an attack of ash-borers to become an 18-foot tall tree which provides berries for the birds. The red dogwood has grown from a 6' sapling to a twenty-foot tree which, although it "blooms" erratically, provides nice fall colour in its leaves. Sometimes it's hard to believe I've lived here thirty years (the longest I've ever lived in one spot), but the spectacle of the garden records the story in a most eloquently stated natural history.