Friday Fabulous Flower - Maackia

Since there won't be a new blog posted for a couple of days at least, here's a FFF a bit early.  This is the first time this tree has flowered on our campus, a bit of a new addition, and it's sort of a surprise in that TPP was told it wasn't very handsome even in flower.  This is Maackia amurensis, the Amur maackia, quite obviously a legume, and based on all description a very tough tree tolerant of dry, poor soil conditions, and is hardy to zone 3 to boot. While not spectacular like a royal Poinciana, it did catch my eye right away, and not many other trees flower this time of year.  At any rate, it's not a species you see very often outside of botanical gardens and arboreta, but it's worth thinking about if you have a tough place for a flowering tree.  It also might make a good street tree reaching 20-30 feet in height and crown width. 

Friday Fabulous Flower - Royal Poinciana

It's the last day of November, and while the local weather is mild, the onset of winter always has TPP longing for the tropics a bit.  So here's a fabulous bit of the tropics, and what may well be the most fantastic of all ornamental flowering trees, the royal poinciana (Delonix regia, Fabaceae).  This is a classic rain tree.  First at maturity the tree has a remarkably broad, spreading, and low crown, clearly not the form of a forest tree, but one from an open, seasonally dry savanna.  While native to Madagascar, where it's endangered in the wild, it's cultivars are found as UTF (ubiquitous tropical flora).  Second, rain trees tend to be big bang flowerers with a large number of flowers open all at once making for a flamboyant display.  Although the scale makes this tree look really low to the ground, you can easily walk under its branches with no danger of bonking your head.  In Queensland a colleague had one of these that covered the whole lawn in front of his house.  Good thing there is no commandment to not covet your neighbors' trees.   

Friday Fabulous Flower - Golden Chain Tree

If you are looking for a small flowering tree to brighten up some spot in your garden, then you must consider a golden chain tree (Laburnum x watereri). For a flowering tree their display is fairly long lived (think 1.75 l vs. 0.75 l bottle of wine), and the tree is fairly tolerant, but maybe not even completely hardy in zone 5 in our experience. They do flower at an early age and can be trained to an arbor if you have the patience, in which case the long pendant inflorescences hang down rather like wisteria. Ours sits way back at the intersection between a perennial bed and a Japanese garden, but the display of even our small tree (recovering from winter die back a year ago) was easily seen from our house 200 feet away.