Outside the old town hall of Plagwitz, Leipzig protects a tree from the other side of the Atlantic: a honey locust, a North American species that arms its trunk with branched thorns.
Photo: Vinaceus (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Honey Locust
Gleditsia triacanthos
A wild honey locust is armed. We map 10 of them, in 10 cities.
Branched thorns up to fifteen centimetres long grow straight out of the trunk and the older wood, generally read as a defence against browsing animals that no longer exist in North America. Street plantings use thornless varieties, which is part of why old specimens look so different from one another. Zaragoza's had three main branches taken out of it at some point and came out the far side as a parasol, a flat horizontal crown on a short trunk. Florence's has never been bred for anything: over five metres round, standing alone at a residential junction, and known locally as Spino di Giuda, which people regularly confuse with the pink flowered tree of the same legend. Copenhagen's has been surveyed and remeasured since 1941, twelve metres then and sixteen in 2019.
Leipzig
Cagliari
Italians call this species spino di Giuda, Judas's thorn, and the local name for this particular tree sometimes adds inerme: thornless.
Montreal
The way this tree's age was worked out is that somebody read the gravestone beside it.
Krakow
Twelve metres from the library's red oak stands its quieter neighbour, a honey locust with a trunk two metres twenty three around, one of relatively few of its species protected anywhere in Krakow...
Florence
Florence has two trees popularly linked to Judas, and this is the one people picture wrong.
Eindhoven
Autumn colour
This honey locust stands more than twenty-four metres tall, which the species almost never manages in the Netherlands.
Warsaw
Honey locust grows thorns on its own trunk, branched like antlers and up to the length of a hand.
Copenhagen
Autumn colour
Someone has been keeping notes on this tree since 1941.
Zaragoza
Somebody took three main branches out of this tree and it became a parasol.
Wilmington, Delaware
Delaware's champion honeylocust has a trunk less than half as thick as one we map in Florence.
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