In Praise Of Fragant Paulownia
LEAD: FOUR years ago, in the gift shop at Winterthur in Delaware, I bought a small potted seedling of Paulownia tomentosa, a tree native to China and named in honor of Anna Paulowna (1795-1865), a Dutch princess noted for her passion for botany. The tree was only one year old, and it had been pruned back to the ground to give it a root system capable of supporting the rapid growth that was sure to follow that summer.
FOUR years ago, in the gift shop at Winterthur in Delaware, I bought a small potted seedling of Paulownia tomentosa, a tree native to China and named in honor of Anna Paulowna (1795-1865), a Dutch princess noted for her passion for botany. The tree was only one year old, and it had been pruned back to the ground to give it a root system capable of supporting the rapid growth that was sure to follow that summer.
In September I grabbed an ax and headed for the tree, bent on its eradication. It had grown an alarming 12 feet in a single season, and its trunk was four inches in diameter; my wife, however, stayed my hand. She had seen the tree in bloom not only at Winterthur but also in nearby Longwood Gardens, where they grow in a long double allee. She dissuaded me from getting rid of our paulownia.
My doubts continued to grow, however. Someone told me that under the right conditions, paulownias are prodigious self-seeders, almost as successful in reproducing their kind as are catalpas and ailanthus, both rank and weedy trees. My own eyes told me that this tree was out of scale in our garden of modest size. The immense and very coarse leaves blacken at the slightest hint of frost in the autumn, falling immediately to the ground, where they can smother smaller plants still in bloom.
The tree has grown faster than my doubts about it. It now stands 35 feet tall, and its long branches, curiously tilted upward at their tips, cast a 20-foot circle of deep shade from the first unfolding of the leaves in late May until that blackening frost arrives.
I've learned to live with our paulownia and even to love it. Against the background of two white dogwoods nearby, its heavy clusters of pale purple flowers are a pleasant sight, if not exactly spectacular.
But my younger son, Michael, just gave me a lesson about the true merits of this tree. He lives with his wife in an apartment, and our garden provides them with cut flowers from March to October. He dropped by the house recently, but we have been in that lull between high spring and early summer when not much is blooming.
The paulownia, however, was at its peak. The lowest branches are out of reach now, but my son fetched a ladder and pruning sheers, and brought down half a dozen clusters of flowers. What was merely a pleasant sight at a distance turns out to be so lovely close up that I am ready to abandon all fear of overstatement or hyperbole. The blossoms of Paulownia tomentosa are more beautiful than those of any other tree I know.
Each cluster of blooms bears small and rounded buds at the top. Further down, they elongate into velvety, purple-blue tubes two inches long. Near the bottom of the cluster, the flowers look like elegant ballroom dresses of a century ago, pleated from the waist to half their length, then flaring out, as if ready to waltz. When fully open, their deep purple changes to pale lilac suffused with creamy yellow. The calyx enclosing bud or flower is also very beautiful, a light tan with the look and feel of suede.
Paulownia delights the nose as well as the eye. The fragrance is honeyed, with suggestions of lemon and apricot, and it is so pervasive that three spikes of flowers in a vase indoors sweeten the air a room or two away.
A final curious fact about paulownia is its attractiveness to an odd element of the criminal underworld, paulownia rustlers. Its wood is in huge demand in Japan, where it used is making ceremonial boxes for jewelry and other treasures. The tree as a result has become uncommon there and here a source of profit to thieves with chain saws and good connections to the international black market. Several trees were lost on Riverside Drive a few years back, and the population of paulownias at Winterthur, where I got my plant, has also been reduced by theft.
GARDENING