I have some questions about our London Plane street trees (Platanus x hispanica for you smarty pants, formerly Platanus acerifolia) that I'd like to have answered. Can someone tell me:
When was the leaf adopted for the Park's Dept. logo?
When were all the Brooklyn street trees planted, more or less?
Does anyone still call them Buttonballs? What is a buttonball?
Were they the inspiration for classic army camouflage?
Why is their use as street trees now restricted?
Why is it called a London Plane tree if this hybrid species orignated in Spain, where the rain falls mainly on the plain?
I often wonder about these things as I walk up Windsor Place, which is lined with an elegant chorus line of the trees, although someone's tried to undermine their grandeur by placing a Groucho mask midway up one tree's trunk. With some display of consideration, they painted the mask to coordinate with the many hues you see in the tree's patchy bark.
In a A Natural History of New York City (1971) John Kiernan describes the trees muli-toned bark as "piebald," which I take to mean spotty. It's not a word people use everyday, even if we really should just to see if anyone is listening. I understand that "pie" refers to magpies, which are black and white, and were originally just called "pie" birds, and "bald" means white. That adds up to black and white, and some more white, but I take it that something pied just means multi-colored.
In the picture above, the London Plane is the piebald one in the back. I have no idea what the lumpy tree in the front is but I admire it's lovely humps.
If you're still reading, here's another question. What variety of the hybrid are our street trees? Ok, that's it.
7 comments:
If you dig up photos from as near as the early 1930s, you'll see that streets that now have lovely, fully mature trees had nary a twig on them back then. I think the usually maligned Robert Moses was responsible, but I may be misaken. I thought the Parks Dept. leaf was a norway maple, Moses' favorite. Again, I may be wrong.
God it must have been depressing back in the 30's. Saul Bellow wrote about that in Dangling Man.
I found a good article about the logo design from someone called Mr. Gingko. More on that later.
Funny, I thought just the same thing about camouflage, last summer I think, looking at the peely-green of the trees at Cadman Plaza. I imagined urban park soldiers darting between the twilit trees.
As children we convinced ourselves that the itchy-inducing seed would make us blind.
How funny! Maybe they'd also make you piebald, and maybe that would actually by really fashionable.
http://www.bartleby.com/122/13.html
Pied Beauty
:-)
http://wethreecats.blogspot.com/2009/02/heart-and-soul-of-house.html
More pied beauty there...last one, I promise.
Love the cat blog! Send all the links you like.
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