The Knott Street Wingnuts

Nine Caucasian wingnuts line two blocks of NE Knott Street, five in front of the church and four across the road from it, and the city numbered every one of them when it designated the lot in 1996. Caucasian wingnut is not a street tree anywhere. It comes from the forests between the Black Sea and the Caspian, it suckers freely, it wants wet feet, and no municipal planting manual recommends it. Somebody in Irvington planted nine. What you get for that is the catkins. Wingnut hangs green chains of winged seeds up to half a metre long through summer, so the whole line drips at once, which is a thing worth timing a walk for. The leaves are pinnate and ash-like, up to twenty leaflets, and the crowns are far wider than the trunks suggest: the biggest here is 2.3 metres round and throws a crown twenty three metres across. They are the reason to start an Irvington walk at this corner. Everything else on this page in this neighbourhood is within six hundred metres of them.