intoxicating

intoxicating

cream-white clouds of black locust 

racemes - summer's heralds

The black locusts have burst into blossom, intoxicating me, and the honeybees, for one wild week in late May. The buds look like a bundle of white slippers, while the creamy blossoms with green throats look like little orchids hanging in tantalizing racemes. The shape of both buds and blossoms shows Robinia pseudoacacia's relation to the pea family. The blossoms are edible, as are the young pods and seeds; however, the bark and leaves are toxic, especially to livestock.

Nitrogen-fixing bacteria grow symbiotically on its roots, so black locust can easily tolerate our Iowa clay and take up residence in areas where the soil has been disturbed, where it grows quickly and spreads by underground shoots. 

Black locust timber is so hard and rot-resistant that a fence post set in the ground can last for over a century. This is the tree that gave Abraham Lincoln the epithet. "Rail Splitter," from his early days of splitting black locust logs for rails and posts. Unfortunately, since at least 1900, locust borers have destroyed many of the big old trees and young trees rarely grow large enough to be valuable as timber.

But the fact that it grows quickly makes it valuable as firewood. We don't (yet) have black locusts on our property, but we do have a lot of honey locusts. However, honey locust has huge clusters of extremely long, sharp thorns guarding the entire trunk, so cutting it for firewood is, well, a thorny business. Black locust, on the other hand, has tiny spines at the base of the pinnate leaves, so it's a much better deal. Not only is it hard and burns slowly, producing very little smoke, but is said to have a heat content higher than any other wood, comparable to anthracite coal. And like its thorny cousin, if you cut it down, it grows back quickly from the stump, so it becomes an excellent renewable source of firewood.