Field Notes—

Awakened By The Cottonwood Tree

By Curtiss Clark

A man, sealed inside a daydream, sealed inside a car, sealed inside the asphalt, steel, and churning grit of the traffic cauldron at Church Hill Road and Exit 10, was tapped on the shoulder by Tinkerbell and invited to awaken to summer.

Well, actually it was closer to 10,000 Tinkerbells. I was the dreaming man sitting in traffic last week who snapped back to consciousness in a blizzard of floating, twirling fairies that had descended on the intersection in a breeze. These delicate, fanciful emissaries of nature had pierced the formidable layered defenses of that time and place effortlessly.

Lighter than air, they rose and fell in a westerly drift, giving form to the invisible breeze. These were the downy emanations of a cottonwood tree. But where was the tree?

On several subsequent trips through the intersection, I scanned the periphery looking for the source, finding it several days later bordering the parking lot of Newtown Cleaners a couple hundred yards up the road. Legions of cottonwood seed paratroopers swirled and drifted in the lot, while up in the branches, thousands more clustered in clouds awaiting the succession of June breezes that would carry them away to awakenings in every direction.

Cottonwood trees are a type of poplar. They are dioecious, which means that there are male and female cottonwood trees. A female Eastern cottonwood (Populus deltoides) grown in an open area can produce nearly 50 million seeds, overcoming by sheer numbers the impediments to germination imposed by busy intersections, the dry hardpan of vacant lots, and the incessant sun of the longest days of the year. The seeds are smaller than a grain of rice and are suspended from their tufts of “cotton” when they emerge from ripened catkins.

Cottonwood trees are fast growing and are among the largest of the North American hardwoods, though their wood is not very hard. The wood is not well suited for finish work, but it is used for shipping pallets and crates and other short-lived utilitarian constructions. The wood is perfect, however, for making beautiful trees. Cottonwood trees can stretch to 100 feet in height, and they are popular as shade trees and wind breaks in less forested areas of the country.

The leaves are triangular like the Greek letter delta, hence the name deltoides. They are attached to the tree by stems flattened in such a way as to give the leaves a kind of quivering movement in the wind, like their poplar cousins, the aspens. And the leaves are surprisingly rich in proteins and amino acids if you care to supplement your diet with cottonwood leaf concentrate.

The deeply grooved bark contains salicin, popular in folk medicine as a tonic and antirheumatic agent. Herbalists say the body uses salicin to produce salicylic acid, which most of us know as aspirin.

Of all its useful properties, however, I value most the cottonwood’s ability to transform daydreamers wrapped in layers of insensibility into fully conscious men and women just in time to welcome summer.