Wort. What's A Wort?

I think I missed deciduous trees living for so long away from home in places like San Francisco and Hong Kong and Beijing where they just don’t grow.  Eucalyptus are lovely in their own way.  I appreciate the banyan trees that stand immutable in the creative destruction of Tsim Sha Tsui and poplars of Beijing, despite all the spring-time catkins the female trees all emit.  But it was only when I hopped over to Tokyo or much more infrequently went up to Dong Bei (aka Manchuria) that you get to see proper deciduous trees.  The trees I grew up with. 

Yesterday I impulse-purchased a Swamp Tupelo and an Empress Tree from Ty Ty nursury in Georgia.   The Swamp Tupelo, as the name suggests likes a nice drink now and then.  It thrives in but doesn’t require a particularly moist environment.  It can grow up here even though it sounds like it wouldn’t be wise to plant north of the Mason Dixon.  We have a wet patch off to the north side of the house.  It catches the runoff from the mountain above us and it’s always sopping wet.  Why not put something in there that thinks damp is a plus?  The Empress Tree is a flaming purple affair that seemed a find compromise to the jacaranda-sort of tree I had in my mind. 

Well, I got an email today saying they wouldn’t be shipping these trees till December.  May was the last month they were shipping.  Ahh but it is May.  Can’t we talk?  Are you not shipping because there is a risk in this warm weather?   I wrote them an email with all my questions and the autoreply suggested that no one was reading emails during the Covid affair.  One would have thought that this would have been the easiest of services to maintain.  Call this number, if you want engagement.  Today I did and after a bit of holding it all up to the light: “gee, is there no way you could just send it now?”, I cancelled the order.

Today, I came out and paid my wife a good morning.  She was meandering around “her” garden, her property and she asked me to re-identify a plant or two with my app.  The Virginia Spiderwort has an evocative name and was obviously planted long before we arrived.  The purple flowers open in the day and close themselves at night.  St. John’s Wort, Spider Wort.  What’s a wort?  Surely it has the unfortunate association of a wart.  A quick look suggests that ‘wort’ is the traditional term for a plant with medicinal purposes. 

Behind the garden is a beautiful, black tree that has no branches low to the ground.  It rises up some twenty feet before the bottom branches reach out in a thick, uniform fashion forming a cone for the next, dense twenty feet.  I’d marveled at the tree all winter.  Have tried on more than one occasion to identify the tree with my app.  Today I noticed a low- lying branch and poked the app up into the tree till, low-and-behold I was informed that this was a Black Tupelo.  Well, I’ll be darned.  I didn’t have to order a Tupelo from Georgia.  I have a forty-footer right here in the yard.  I stood back then and admired “my” Black Tupelo, which can only sound rather southern.  And then I went to inform my wife. 

Friday, 5/29/20