The Yellow-wood of Major's Hill Park

The wild range of this species is a scatter of hillsides in Kentucky, Tennessee and the western Carolinas, and even there it is one of the rarest native trees in eastern North America. This one grows well over a thousand kilometres north of all of it, on the edge of a downtown park in Ottawa. American yellowwood, Cladrastis kentukea, which older labels and the capital's own register still call Cladrastis lutea. The name is literal. The heartwood is bright yellow and was once boiled down for dye. The bark is smooth and pale grey, closer to a beech than to anything else growing near it, and the tree forks low and spreads wide, so it is one to walk under rather than past. Every few years, and pointedly not every year, it hangs the whole crown with drooping chains of white flowers that smell like wisteria, which is the family it belongs to. In the years it skips, it just makes leaves. It shares this end of Major's Hill Park with the two vine-leaved limes, and unlike them it arrived without paperwork. The register names the tree and gives no planting date, and nothing else we can find mentions this specimen at all. Somebody in the parks service probably knows the year. If that is you, we would like it.