Kentucky Coffee Tree: Why Arborists Love This Tree

Lou Meyer from Davey's mid-Atlantic region joins us to talk about the Kentucky coffee tree, including its features, habits, traits and why homeowners should consider planting one. 

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Davey Tree Expert Company's podcast, Talking Trees. I'm your host, Doug Oester. Each week, our expert arborists share advice on seasonal tree care, how to make your trees thrive, arborists' favorite trees, and much, much more. Tune in every Thursday to learn more because here at the Talking Trees Podcast, we know trees are the answer. Well, I'm joined again by my friend Lou Meyer. He is on the show more than anyone, and we are doing our series, occasional series, uh, on species. Lou is an arborist for the Davy Tree Expert Company in Baltimore. And Lou, I think this tree is underused in the landscape called Kentucky Coffee Tree. Teach us everything we need to know about this tree.

SPEAKER_01 0:51

Yes, underutilized,

Kentucky coffee tree introduction

SPEAKER_01 0:53

uh hits it right on the head. This tree is a beautiful tree. Uh medium to large tree, fills so many gaps, and is just underused across the board. The Kentucky Coffee Tree, Gymnoclatus Dioetius, um, is the uh the Latin name, and uh just a great tree. It's also known you know colloquially as the stump tree, as the Kentucky mahogany, and the American coffee berry.

SPEAKER_00 1:25

Um just a great tree. Kentucky mahogany sounds like a that's a great uh great name, I think.

SPEAKER_01 1:33

Doesn't it? No, it's beautiful. The uh the Latin name, so gymno clotis. Gymno is naked in Greek, and Clotis is branch. So this tree um sheds its leaves pretty early, and that's why it got that name, because for many months of the year it's a naked tree, uh, or naked, naked branched tree, gymno clotus. Uh the French Canadians called it Chikot or Shikot, C-H-I-C-O-T, which means stubby, um, due to its stout branching. But uh don't let those names fool you. It's a it's a pretty tree.

SPEAKER_00 2:09

Why

Why are certain trees more popular than others?

SPEAKER_00 2:10

do you think certain trees are more popular than others, especially when you have a a good arborist to to to guide you? We uh what when we're talking about this series of of different species, some everybody plants, but others just they're just not that popular. And is it just because they're not known, or what do you think it is, or is it like fashion, like they come and go?

SPEAKER_01 2:35

I think it's like fashion. Uh, and I don't want to blame the nursery uh industry on it. I I have lots of friends in the nursery industry do great things. I think that when they have a hot species, they push it, and okay, it's easy to sell oaks and maples, and because people know them. And that's not their fault, you know. When when homeowners come to your nursery and they say, I want an oak, well, you're gonna have a lot of oaks on hand because a lot of people are gonna ask for it. If no one's asking for Kentucky coffee tree, you're not gonna have it in this in the nursery. Another thing with this particular, well, before we get too far, with this particular species, the coffee tree is one of the few trees that has a pretty big taproot when it's young. So moving it in a from a nursery setting when you dig this out of the ground, they don't do great with that. So it's good to either grow them from seed, uh, but you are finding more of them. You find them a little bigger once they start losing that taproot, it's uh it's easier to move. So, but no, there's there's definitely fashionable trees out there. And as most of the listeners probably know, it's been an exciting 20

Exotic vs. native trees

SPEAKER_01 3:41

years in the industry where we went from very boutique uh uh exotic trees in a lot of our landscape back towards that natural native push. Now, I think there's definitely a place for exotic species out there. I think the seeing a nice non-native tree in a landscape is not the end of the world. I think it's great. It provides visual beauty, it provides discussion point, and if it gets people excited about the landscape, that's a great thing. But we are moving into that native uh native planting as an industry for a lot of very, very good reasons. And all this to say that I I think we're gonna see more coffee trees being planted because they are a beautiful tree, native to the eastern United States, um and uh and the Midwest, and and they just do really well.

How did this tree get its name?

SPEAKER_00 4:34

So, how does coffee become part of the Kentucky coffee tree? Why why does it get that name?

SPEAKER_01 4:40

Yeah, so it's it's part of the Fabaceae group, it's a legume, much like the red buds that have those little seed pods or even peas, the pea pods that you pull off of peas. These are all legumes. And inside of the pods of the Kentucky coffee tree, uh, these these pods are about six to ten inches long. They have six to nine seeds inside of there. Now, these seeds are in a dark, sweet pulp. If you break it open, it's it's I'm gonna say it's gross, but it's kind of icky in there. These seeds, if you take them and roast them, uh Native Americans would boil them into a uh into a brew, the the Meskwaki uh group would uh brew them into a kind of coffee, and the colonial settlers would uh use this also. Now, uh the the fruit itself is toxic. So I'm gonna put a disclaimer out there. Do not eat this raw. I don't even suggest eating it cooked. Uh you know, for liability reasons, we have to say, do not eat this. However, uh they did roast and uh brew the beans. Now, what I what I read and what I know is that once the trade route to the east coast opened up and the Kentucky colonials could get real coffee, they ditched the coffee tree real quick. Uh, it's apparently not a very good thing, but uh, but no, the roasted beans, you could eat them like roasted chestnuts if you're willing to. Again, I don't recommend it, but you can.

What size tree is best to plant?

SPEAKER_00 6:11

With that long tap root, what size tree would be best to plant, do you think, or does it matter?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

I think the two to three inch one. You want to get it in a container also, uh, so it's not being fresh dug with a uh with a bald and burlap. You know, most trees these days come in containers anyway. Uh, nurseries and growers have realized that homeowners don't have large pieces of equipment to move bald and burlap trees that weigh a gazillion pounds, and that landscapers who have the equipment have no interest in moving trees that weigh a gazillion pounds. Uh, so yeah, you know, find with a deep tap root. Um, there are a there are more and more nurseries growing these in ways that homeowners can transport them. So they're not as difficult to find as they were 10, even eight years ago. Um, so you can get them. Yeah.

Where does it like to grow?

SPEAKER_01 7:03

Where does it like to grow? Like what kind of the upper south, Appalachia, they don't go much farther south than that. Um, you know, so if you think of Kentucky, which is where the name comes from, parts of West Virginia, the Midwest. So these things do grow through Ohio and Illinois, but in Minnesota and and uh Michigan, and they go up to Ontario. There's an odd pocket, native pocket of them in New York. So uh they are there as well, and they're happy up there, so they they do well in in colder climates. Uh, it was the state tree of Kentucky, that's something we often say for 20 years. For whatever reason, the tulip poplar was the state tree of Kentucky up until the 60s no 70s, and then for 20 years there's the Kentucky coffee tree, and then they reverted back. I don't know why. Um they probably tasted that coffee, right? Yeah, right. Tasted the coffee, or people were getting so excited about they're eating these toxic seeds raw and they said, uh, we gotta knock this off. Are the seed pods a pain? No, I mean, if it if you have them growing over your pool, it probably can be, but they're not falling off until the fall, anyways. They're not prolific seeders. Um, and I love using, you know, we we've talked about using tree parts for crafts and kids' activities. You know, legumes are cool. I love uh locust trees that have the giant pods that fall off of them. Catalpa trees have the big cigar-shaped pods, and all these are our legume family, also. And we use a lot of these and in nature crafts at uh nature centers and other places. We love using the tree parts, so this is a good one for that.

SPEAKER_00 8:50

Have we ever talked about catalpa as one of our species? Because we should. Oh, that's definitely on the list. We'll put it on there. We're gonna make that happen. That was one of my childhood trees in the backyard that always amazed people with those pods.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

That would be cool. That would be cool.

Kentucky coffee tree size

SPEAKER_01 9:06

Uh, the tree size, so this thing gets 60 to 80 feet tall, not a giant tree. I usually don't see them that big. Um, with a 40 to 50 foot spread, two to four feet in diameter is a is a good size Kentucky coffee tree. They're usually smaller than that. Um, the National Champ is right here in Maryland, in Brookville, Maryland. Uh, it's privately owned, so I've never visited it, but it's 63-inch diameter. So it's a big honkin Kentucky coffee tree. It's 106 feet tall with a 77-foot spread. But there are some other famous ones around. Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire has one that's 91 feet tall. Uh the Texas record is at Will Rogers Park in Amarillo, Texas. It's a 51-foot-tall one, which is weird because it's down south. They don't grow down there much. Uh, but Mount Vernon, right here in northern Virginia, George Washington's home, has uh has a pretty good collection of Kentucky coffee trees at his estate. So um, yeah, there are some famous ones. Whereabouts in the landscape

A small genus

SPEAKER_01 10:08

does it like to grow? Uh, you can put it pretty much anywhere. These are great straight trees. They're tolerant of drought, they're tolerant of poor soils. So it's a really good park tree for inner cities. One of the other neat things, too. Um, there is a professor at North Dakota State University named John Ball. And John is a led, or Dr. Ball is a legend in the arbiculture industry. He has he does presentations at a lot of the International Society of Arborture chapter conferences. So the ISA, the governing body of arborists in the in the world, uh, is broken up into chapters. So, for instance, I'm in the mid-Atlantic chapter, which is Maryland, Washington, D.C., Virginia, and West Virginia. You, Doug, are in the Pendell area, so Pennsylvania and Delaware. And each of these chapters have annual conferences where we invite speakers to give presentations, and us arborists, get our CEUs, our continuing education units, so that we can maintain our arborist certification. Dr. Ball runs this circuit because he is a fabulous speaker. And one of my favorite presentations I ever saw, he was talking about four species that we should really focus on because there aren't many uh or genuses, because there aren't many species within these genuses out there. And because of that, there's not a lot of opportunity for pests and diseases to travel around the world and kill them. If you think of like the ash trees of a North America, fraxinous. Well, there are a ton of fraxinus in Asia, where the Asian longhorn beetle, or where the emerald ash borer lives, it naturally, and those two species have evolved together. So the emerald ash borer doesn't kill the ashes of Asia. When it was introduced here, our ashes had zero defense and it wrecked them, 99.8% mortality rate. Trees like the Kentucky coffee tree, they don't have many species within this genus. So there's a lot lower of a possibility of other pest species jumping to this one and uh wiping it out. And so I love the idea of planting this in cities where we've lost species after species from monoculture planting. I don't think we should plant monocultures of this, but for disease and pest resistance, it's the best way to plant smart, is planting genuses that don't have a whole lot of species within them.

SPEAKER_00 12:45

That's interesting. What uh what's a fall

Fall color

SPEAKER_00 12:48

color like on the tree?

SPEAKER_01 12:49

Yeah, the fall color uh is bright yellow. I don't think you really plant it for the fall color like you would other things. Although I say that one of my favorite fall trees is hickories. Hickorys have a yellow color that is gorgeous, and we never talk about that one. So this one's a good fall color. Uh, the leaves are alternate. This is a fun one, it's bipinately compound, which means that uh each leaf is almost like a stem that has other stems coming off it and then little leaflets. So you would look at a leaflet and you go, Oh, that's a leaf. No, no, that leaflet is part of a grouping of other leaflets that make up a branch of the leaf itself. So there's about 10 to 14 leaf stems coming off the main stem and seven to thirteen leaves on each of those pinnates. So each leaf is about one to three feet long and one and a half to two feet wide, but they have all these tiny leaflets on them. Uh so it's pretty, it's pretty interesting. Uh, it's unique, it's not the only one, but it's one of the few. Uh, the leaves themselves, they're dark yellowish green on the top side and a pale green beneath. And like I said, they turn to that yellow fall

Flowers

SPEAKER_01 14:08

color. One thing I do like about this tree is the flowers. The flowers come out in June, depending on where you are, June into late June. Uh, it's dioecious. So we talk about trees, uh, their genders or their sexes are either monoecious or dioeocious. Monoeocious has both genders on the plant, and so they can self-pollinate. Well, it's not a good thing. Um, these flowers are kind of a whitish green, three to four inches long, and they're really pretty. Now, you wouldn't plant them for the flowers. You don't walk out there and go, oh, what a beautiful flowering tree. But when you do see them, they're very pleasing for the eye.

SPEAKER_00 14:43

Well, it sounds to me like

Evolutionary anachronism

SPEAKER_00 14:45

another one that would be a good choice in my forest, replacing the oak trees, because those leaves sound like they're giant and would be hard to rake. So I just want to let them go and do their thing and and decompose into the soil.

SPEAKER_01 14:59

Well, it's the it's it's the leaf lits that fall off, so it's kind of like locust trees, it's not terrible, but yes, it would be a great one for the forest. Um, one neat thing, too, about this one you asked about eating the seed pods. So this the Kentucky coffee tree is considered an example of what's called evolutionary anachronism. Um, Osage Orange is another one. There's there are no animals that eat these seed pods now when they fall. So what we think is that, and they're like they're tough, they're leathery seed pods, they're not like they're not tasty to any animal, uh, and they're too difficult for many animals now to chew through. So, what we think is that the megafauna of the past, so our dinosaurs, our giant sloths. I mean, North America was populated by animals that we don't have anymore. We had bears, we had lions, we had all sorts of animals here. Um, and you had these megafauna that would feed on these pods. They would feed on Osage Orange, which are the monkey balls. We'll cover that someday. So those large green balls that are you know the size of a softball. Nothing eats those. Um, and we think that the megafauna used to eat these, they pass through their systems, and that's how these things were dispersed. Kentucky coffee tree today, um, the seed pods, they it's they don't self-seed very easily. Those pods have to break down. Um, so they do well in wetlands because the wet conditions allow the seed pods to rot away faster to allow for germination quicker before the seeds themselves dry up. Um, so kind of interesting. This is an ancient tree that you know our ancient megafauna used to feed on. So I can tell my grandkids it's dinosaur food. Yeah, when you plant in the backyard, you're gonna attract all the woolly mammoths to come.

SPEAKER_00 16:52

All right, Lou. Good stuff as always. Uh, thanks for filling us in on the Kentucky Coffee Tree. Appreciate your time as always. And what do you think our next species will be? Do you have any ideas?

SPEAKER_01 17:03

I think the next one we're gonna do is River Birch. That's one that I love and that a lot of people can relate to.

SPEAKER_00 17:09

All right, Lou, thanks again. We will talk to you next time. Great talking to you, Doug. We always learn something interesting from Lou Meyer. I can't wait to tell my grandkids about dinosaur food. But I want you to tune in every Thursday to the Talking Trees Podcast from the Davy Tree Expert Company. I am your host, Doug Oster, and do me a big favor, subscribe to the podcast so you won't miss the show. And let us know what you think of what we're doing. There's a couple different ways to do that. Send us an email to podcast at Davey.com. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S at D A V E Y.com. You can also click the link at the end of our show notes to text us a fan mail message. We'd love to hear from you. And as always, we like to remind you on the Talking Trees podcast. Trees are the answer.