Meet Your Street TreeCommon Name: Kentucky Coffeetree Scientific Name: Gymnocladus dioicus Location: Nostrand Avenue between Park & Prospect Place Leaf Pattern: Bi-pinnately compound Leaflet Margins: Entire (smooth) Tree Habit/Form: Oval, rounded, upright Walking north on Nostrand Avenue towards Prospect Place in the winter, you’ll find a row of four rather skeletal arboreal creatures. Their branching, scaly bark might elicit a feeling of disgust. As if its form is not ghastly enough, you’ll often find its giant, dark brown, desiccated, bean-like seedpods dangling off its branches. This winter appearance obliges me to think of its summer form: a towering, ethereal organism cloaked in hundreds of thousands of tiny leaflets. The dappled canopy comes from the structure of its leaves—each one is made up of about 40-100 leaflets. Each leaflet attaches to one of 10 secondary stalks which then attach to one central stalk. Put it all together and you have a 3 foot long leaf (!), each one emerging every spring and senescing every fall. The irregular scaffold of branches and the dizzying morphology of their leaves create an uncanny sense that these trees are constantly in locomotion—that they have someplace to be. But that place is in fact right here, with us. Hailing from a wide range of habitats in the Midwest, the Kentucky Coffeetree can handle heat, extreme drought, periodic flooding, and poor soils. However, for thousands of years, indigenous peoples have roasted, ground and processed their seed into medicines, coffee-like beverages, and other fare. Millions of years before, now extinct megafauna chomped down and then dispersed their toxic seeds. For me, this tree offers an inspiring story of resilience and adaptation, the harsh reality of death and dormancy in winter, and the swelling hope of rebirth in spring.
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