The oakleaf hydrangeas are rioting all around Stone Mountain. Hydrangea quercifolia is showy: it’s a big bush — taller than I am — with cream flowers. It’s also a native.
Seeing the blossoms in the forest makes me wonder why people who love showy flowers were dissatisfied with the natives and imported plants we now consider invasive.
If you look on the forest floor, you’ll find young empress trees, Paulownia tomentosa. Picture a belt-high shrub with leaves the size of platters, rather than dinner plates. Young bigleaf magnolias have enormous leaves, but they are oblong. The leaves of empress trees are hearts.
Empress trees have a mixed reputation in the Piedmont. Some gardeners love them for their spectacular flowers. Jimmy Carter grew them. Others revile them as an invasive species that takes resources from the natives. Connecticut banned them.
I don’t know what to make of the controversy.
The trees came from Asia to Europe in the 1830s and to the United States a decade later.
They are naturalized in the Eastern United States. They have been on American soil longer than many human families.
The fossil record shows Paulownia was once in North America but died out before Homo sapiens arrived. It’s puzzling when one invasive species encounters another.
I still don’t know what, if anything, to do about Paulownia. But if you are trying to understand how these trees got to the United States, I’d recommend the work of Dr. Whitney Adrienne Snow, a history professor at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls, Texas. Her work strikes me as a model.
• Sources: Whitney Adrienne Snow, “Ornamental crop, or invasive? The history of the Empress tree (Paulownia) in the USA”; Forests Trees and Livelihoods, 24:285-96. It’s here:
The North Carolina Extension Service has an article here:
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