The Sapporo Katsuras

These two trees began as seed in a packet posted from Sapporo. William S. Clark, president of Massachusetts Agricultural College and the man who left his Japanese students the parting line "Boys, be ambitious", went to Hokkaido in 1876 to help found what is now Hokkaido University. He collected katsura seed there and sent a share to his friend Charles Sprague Sargent, the Arnold Arboretum's first director. It arrived in 1878, six years after the Arboretum itself existed at all, and the two multi stemmed trees on Meadow Road are what grew from it. They are the oldest katsuras in a collection of 35 and among the oldest documented anywhere in North America. Come in October. Katsura leaves turn apricot and gold, and as they fall and dry they give off a smell most people read as burnt sugar or candy floss; you often catch it before you find the tree. Winter is worth a different look, the silvery grey bark peeling away in narrow rectangular sheets and curved seed follicles hanging on into the cold before the wind takes the seed. Sargent went to Hokkaido himself in 1892 and wrote about katsura as a defining tree of the island's wet lowland woods. One note on sourcing: both accounts here are the Arboretum's own, a plant record and an Arnoldia article rather than two unconnected institutions, though the article's author visited and describes both trees alive and in health.