Cottonwood Trees Are The Bee’s Knees

Cottonwood puffs are Nature’s air cleaners

Piles Of Puffs Are Nothing To Sneeze At

It’s cottonwood time again, and the snowy little seed puffs are arriving by the thousands. Cottonwood trees can be male or female, and unless there’s a male somewhere in the neighborhood, the fluffy female seeds will seek out pollen in vain; while there’s always plenty of pollen in the air during our breezy springs, without a nearby male cottonwood, none of it will be the right kind. If you have a cottonwood on your property, you can tell which it is by looking at the catkins in early spring; male catkins are yellow, while the girls are green.

Every year in late spring, female cottonwood seeds go roaming with the wind, sweeping the air clean of male pollen. Though most people assume that these fluffballs are causing allergies to flare, in fact, the girls are our friends. Like a number of other female seeds, cottonwood gals gather male pollen as they tumble in the breezes. These intrepid explorers are able to grab the guys (which look like tiny, greenish, sand-sized grains) because female tree seeds have a negative electrical charge, while male pollen develops a positive charge from its wind blown journey. When female seeds attract and capture male pollen, they add each grain to their stash until they get heavy enough to sink to the ground. Only a few will find a comfortable place to sprout, and fewer still will survive to treehood, but each new cottonwood is something to treasure.

Not Trash Tree But  Tribal Treasure

Though cottonwoods get precious little respect these days, they have been prized for millenia by bees as well as people. Related to aspens and poplars, these big, beautiful native trees are fast growing and sturdy, with species found all over North America. All were valued by Native American tribes, who used the wood for masks and medicine, ritual and ceremonial objects of many kinds and sizes, from sacred poles to Hopi kachinas. Black Cottonwood, the PNW coastal species, has the familial large, heart-shaped leaves and given good conditions, can reach 150 feet in height. Tribal people had dozens of uses for this medicine tree, from eating the sweet inner bark in spring to making salves from boiling buds with deer fat to treat sore throats and baldness, boiling old leaves into soothing wraps for arthritic joints, and much, much more. Cottonwood trees offer ingredients for paint and poultices, canoes and carrying bags, baskets and buckets, sweat lodge poles, spinning fiber and shampoo. The sticky gum makes glue for arrowheads and feathers, and the antibacterial resin is even used by native bees to seal and protect their hives. Perhaps observing this may have led ancestral people to explore other uses, just as watching squirrels licking maple trees encouraged East Coast Tribes to discover sweet maple sap and learn to make syrup millennia ago.

Sadly, the cottonwood is now among the most loathed trees in North America, mainly because of that abundant fluff but also because this large tree is out of scale with today’s small housing lots and shrinking public parks. Cottonwoods get cut down because their roots break sidewalks and their fluff clogs drains, because branches can break in high winds, and because they’re simply considered to be ‘too messy’. In many communities, cottonwoods are actually classified as “trash trees”, a designation that ought to be unthinkable if not illegal. No Native tradition calls any plant “trash” and no such disrespectful, presumptuous term would ever be used for anything in Nature.

When Nature Gets Messy

The idea that native plants are trash comes from the colonial viewpoint that also held the ‘highest and best use’ for land to be development. This wrongheaded thinking is the root cause of endless destruction of ecosystems and habitats around the globe as humans strive to extract anything perceived to be a ‘better’ resource once stripped from its natural place. Sadly, even gardeners can be blinded by this insane mindset, fooled by conventional thinking into converting every backyard in the country into the same deadly patch of monoculture lawn, edged with the same few border plants, all relentlessly mown and sheared into submission.

The rewilding movement that seeks to allow degraded, abused land to revert to its natural state is often stymied by the cultural conditioning that demands that land must be clearly and obviously tamed by the Hand of Man. Neighbors can get riled up when they see weeds (often native plants) popping up in place of mown turf and sheared shrubs. It’s true that the transition period from, say, a starved and barren backyard or overworked farmland to a thriving young meadow or forest can definitely appear messy, untidy and random looking. Nature can be messy indeed, as the aftermath of any natural disaster shows us, whether from a volcanic explosion, a battering hurricane, a prolonged drought, or an abandoned strip mall. Over time, though, Nature finds a way through the inevitable cracks and crannies, sending up shoots from buried roots and sowing seeds with enormous generosity. While it isn’t practical to allow every chance seedling to flourish wherever it chooses (especially when a potentially huge tree appears inches from the foundation of a home), it’s time to reevaluate our impulse to domesticate and subdue the natural world and instead learn to admire, respect and love natural abundance, defending it wherever we can. Onward, right?