The Grad School Diaries: The Cottonwood Conundrum

As winter in East Lansing starts to merge into spring a bizarre phenomenon has been gradually filling our streets, stray corners, and sometimes most of our deck. It’s a strange white fluff, which looks almost like snow from a distance, but is clearly some kind of plant matter – there’s no way it could be snow given the warm daytime temperatures and the fact that it doesn’t melt. For the past few weeks we’ve been seeing it all over town, drifting by on the wind and piling up wherever it bumps into something solid, but there’s no clear sign of where it’s coming from. It’s another mystery about our new home…

Back in Los Angeles there are a variety of annual drifts and jettisons that you get used to, at least after a while. Probably the best known are the jacaranda trees, and their huge output of brilliant purple flowers, which go through two cycles each calendar year. The blossoms are beautiful, and the tree in bloom is amazing to see, but when the flowers fall off they stick to anything they land on like glue – and they stain it the same vibrant purple until you’ve soaked whatever it is in bleach. Which isn’t always possible – imagine having your car stained purple, for example. At our home in Redondo Beach we had an excellent view of a colossal (40 feet tall at least, and nearly as wide!) jacaranda, which grew in the back yard of the people across the street. I always said it was the ideal situation: we got to see the tree in bloom, but we didn’t have to clean up after it…

We have falling leaves in the Southwest, too; despite the fact that people from other parts of the country persist in believing that Los Angeles has no seasons (or that the seasons are, actually, flash-flood season, fire season and earthquake season), the leaves do turn colors and fall off the trees; our microscopic front yard in Redondo was often covered with the output of the single large tree that grew there for weeks at a time. And you also get odd drifts of pollen, seed pods, pine cones, flowers and whatnot. But in all of my life, I’ve never seen anything like these drifts of white fluff that are now floating around town like flurries of snow…

Eventually we started looking things up online and asking around. A few short searches revealed that the fluff we were seeing was part of the reproductive cycle of the cottonwood tree; the fluff contains seeds that will germinate to form the next generation of the species – if the seeds were properly fertilized before they set out on the wind. That’s right, folks; the output we were seeing was limited to female cottonwood trees. This surprised me for two reasons: one was that we don’t have a cottonwood tree anywhere on our property, and neither do our neighbors on either side, across the street, or behind us. But just as important, in my opinion, was the fact that trees can be female in the first place…

Now, I know that plants come in male and female varieties; that’s why you need bees carrying pollen from one to the other, and all of that other stuff we were supposed to learn about in high school biology class when I was asleep. But you don’t think about trees working the same way, even though they obviously do. One can easily get these lunatic images of what sorts of creatures would pollinate very large plants, with owls or hawks pollinating oaks and pines, condors taking care of giant sequoias, ospreys looking after anything that grows along the banks of rivers, and small, slimy things that scuttle through the air ducts pollinating whatever it is that keeps growing along the interior walls of the Business School complex…

But I digress…

A year ago, while I had certainly heard of cottonwood trees, I don’t believe I’d ever seen one, and I’d certainly never seen their fine white fluff drifting by on the wind. Today it’s just another sign of spring in the town where we live. I can’t help wondering what other routine mysteries are still waiting to sprout around us…