April 2014 Belated Bloom Day and Foliage Follow Up

I missed garden blogger’s Bloom Day yesterday, but you’ll forgive me because any Portland gardener looking for this fabulous ‘Sonoma’ dove tree, Davidia involucrata, can now go pick one up at Thicket today!  You might not even have to duke it out with another customer unless you need more than one – there are three right now.

Technically speaking, the attention-grabbing white flowers are actually bracts, like the related dogwood.

If you’re interested in seeing a mature specimen, take a drive down the Ainsworth Linear Arboretum and it will be be difficult to miss this tree in the median on NE Ainsworth at 12th (? or, it might be 11th) Avenue.  To read more, see my original post on this species from May 2013.

And now, for Foliage Follow-up:  We planted this little bare-branched Amur maackia as a street tree near NE Going on 15th Ave with Friends of Trees on March 14. I too hastily dismissed it as uninteresting, having read somewhere that the fall leaf color is nothing remarkable.

I didn’t know about the attractive emerging spring foliage until today.

Coated in silvery hairs, these unfolding leaves sparkle in the gray light of an overcast day.

Just down the street on NE Skidmore, there’s a slightly more mature street tree that’s a little further along.

Nice contrast with the red foliage tree behind it, but looks great against the pale stones too.

The leaves darken as they mature.  To learn more about this tree, which apparently has a reputation as a tough and adaptable urban street tree, read this short Arnold Arboretum article.

Amur maackia, Maackia amurensis

• Hardy to USDA zone 4
• shrub or small tree to 25 feet tall
• native to Korea and Japan
• Leaves pinnately compound, 10 inches long, lacking in fall color
• Peeling orange bark and 5-inch upright clusters of small white greenish-yellow flowers

Don’t forget to visit our Bloom Day host at www.maydreamsgardens.com and Foliage Follow-up host at www.penick.net.