Spotted and Identified: A Blast from the Past

We were driving home from church on Sunday when I spotted some white flowers on a tree a little ways down a hill from the roadside. At first, I thought they may have been pawpaws hiding in the brush, so I did a U-turn and parked the van, then hiked across the road and down the hillside.

As I got a little closer, I realized the leaf and trunk shapes were all wrong for pawpaw.

Instead, I had discovered an old friend.

Tung oil trees!

Back in my North Florida food forest, in the halcyon year of 2012, I planted a tung tree to memorialize my Grandpa Jud, who was a talented woodworker. He used tung oil to finish some of his projects. When I found a tree for sale at a nursery and discovered the species also bore beautiful flowers, I bought it and put it in the food forest.

Here’s the farewell tour:

I greatly miss that old food forest sometimes. It was a beautiful project.

But back to the tung trees.

Here’s a close-up of the blooms:

And the foliage:

And a single bloom.

They’re just leafing out at this time of year, and the leaf color is a weird lime-green.

I’m going to see if I can find a few trees for my food forest here. Not because they’re particularly useful or edible – they aren’t edible! – but because they remind me of Florida and my past food forest project, as well as Grandpa.

I don’t want to move ever again.

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