The Name of That Tree

This utterly stunning specimen of tree-ness lives in our front yard.  What you can't see in this photo is the way the Paulonia towers over the 6-foot fence that Joe built -- in order to photograph its glory, I had to stand two houses away.  That's how big it is.  It's the kind of tree, as I've written before, that people stop their cars to look at.  In April, when it blooms as above, we talk to strangers, two or three sets a day on the weekends, telling them about the tree, its name, its age.  

The blossoms on this tree have a delicate and delicious fragance, and since it's about 50 feet tall and COVERED with flowers, standing under it this month is mesmerizing.  It's a tree filled with the steady hum of pollinators: bees fill the flowers, climbing in deep in search of nectar, emerging buzzy and buzzed, bumbling back to their hives and nests.

As I write this, the blooms are fading, covering the ground in the yard and the sidewalk beyond the fence.  Once the flowers drop, then the Paulonia will leaf out, producing gigantic deep green leaves, two feet across, providing much-needed shade to the front part of the garden through the hottest part of the summer.  Knowing this, we plant lettuce in the first garden box and ensure that the tomato is well out of the Paulonia's shade zone.

We've grown so accustomed to answering questions about this tree, that we look forward to it.  I always want to invite people in, to see more of what's growing here, what the hives are up to.  But we're not always here to tell the story.

And the story needs to be told.

So when I saw this little item on Terrain, I couldn't pass it up.  We'd talked about getting a fancy, metal sign for the tree, but I like this low-tech solution so much better, not least of which because of how it takes me back to the ardoises of my early French education, the little slates we kept in our desks for math problems and practicing our handwriting, hands dusty with chalk.  Since the little chalkboard is so much smaller than I expected -- I expected it to magically BE one of the same chalkboards that we'd go to Cost Plus to buy -- I practiced on a sheet of paper folded to the same size, figuring out what text I could fit in the small space available.  Then bought a box of colored chalk and a box of plain, and went for it.

So now, when they're walking by or when they've pulled over in their cars, whether we're here or not, people won't go without an answer to their question.  They can have what I always want: to know the name of what I'm looking at, who it is.  That's a little thing that's making me super-happy today, a little quiet service to my neighbors, giving them the name, putting the key in their hands so they themselves can unlock the mystery.