Living Fossils in Calgary, Update, Year 4

 

     I can't believe 4 years have passed since planting these! Above, Kentucky Coffee Tree Gymnocladus dioicus seems to be settling in quite nicely. This year it decided to give up on the top leader branch and leaf out further down instead, that said it grew a new shoot 8" or 20 cm which is pretty good for a "slow grower". I was not even thinking about this when the big hail storm came in June, however, it had barely begun leafing out and thus avoided any damage, talk about a slow leafing out! We were having a warm spring and June was a lot more like summer this year and still this tree was taking it's sweet a** time! When the leaves do grow though what a beautiful sight.

You can see by mid summer the twice compunded leaves reach very large proportions almost 2' or 60cm from stem to end. The leaves will also fold upwards a little in hot weather as you can see here.

This photo taken October 1st shows the fall colour, for the first time in many years we did not have a snow event or even a frost until mid October. The leaves fell almost all at once leaving a skeleton of the main stems which dropped a week or so later.

     Ginko biloba, while surviving is not having a very lucky time, I guess 2020 was bad for ginko too!? Recently I decided to move it to a much more open area which it seemed to be liking. This is also a pretty slow leafer in our area and I could see the green buds slowly developing over weeks in the late spring, one day we were cleaning up some dead branches and my partner pulled a famous jinx move and wacked off the top bud, arghhhhh, after considering divorce for a short time I realized being angry would not change anything. Then we had several hailstorms, the first one literally devastated all of the new tiny leaves so I just thought fate had it out for me. By July new leaves emerged again and when it was getting kinda OK someone threw a frisbee into the top which wrecked those leaves again! So I don't know how much more bad luck could happen to this poor thing but maybe we are done for a few years??? Yeah right! Anyway here are a few leaves in the summer. It has not grown one god damed millimeter it only opens a few leaves when it can. No fall colour this year, it was green right up to the snow October 18 and then just froze.

Better luck next time baby!