Beginner Gardening: Using what you have Yellow Poplar (tulip tree), 1 by GrammyJo

GrammyJo wrote:
We have had Tulip Trees in our neighborhood for many, many years (in Illinois very near St. Louis, MO). Those that have survived over these past 34 years are very large and stately. We've lost many of them over the years too for various reasons, always so sad to me since they are such beautiful trees. Then one of the several tornadoes we've had go through this same neighborhood (either last summer or the summer before last) really wreaked havoc on many of them, two of those being in our yard (one in front and one in the back). I neglected to get those broken large branches pruned back to undamaged wood as of yet (very important) and will do so for sure this fall when the leaves are gone again.

The tree in the back we had planted when it was about 8' tall, a good size young tree. It probably took 12-15 yrs for it to get mature enough to flower, perhaps even a bit longer. We've had blooms on all of ours for maybe a good month and a half now and still have many buds getting ready to open. I just wanted to mention another really neat aspect of having these wonderful Poplars, being that Cedar Waxwings (very cool birds) LOVE Tulip Trees! I don't know if it's the nectar they like, the actual petals, or the many bugs that the flowers draw but we had a very nice size little flock or 'group' of them for about 3 weeks and they finally moved on about a week ago (I MISS them too!). While they were here I also discovered that CW's love the petals of my Washington Hawthorn tree also. It is so stunning in flower and while that little flock was enjoying the Tulip flowers I realized that they were also DEVOURING my Hawthorn blossoms! I took many photos of them doing so. My husband and I 1st thought they were after the bugs the blossoms were attracting but then I realize they were actually having a salad instead. They methodically removed almost EVERY petal from the thousands on our (rather large) tree within about 3 days, leaving our lovely tree looking more like a 'baby’s breath' tree. I dealt with it though since watching them made it quite tolerable. ;o) The image I've uploaded is cropped. I apologize for the red color 'bleed' on the flowers but it was taken with my zoom open a lot and I'd also allowed more light into the shot since it was in shadow to quite an extent. I'll correct that later but wanted to post this now. You can see that most of the petals are gone in this cropped photo. Imagine what the whole tree looked like with almost all of them gone!