The Original Mystery Plant

Photo by John Nelson

In the past several years, attention has been devoted to trees in the South that grow quickly and provide a fast supply of shade or timber, or both. The mystery plant is outstanding as a fast shade producer. It is a tropical species and isn't native.

The mystery plant comes from the damp forests of southeastern Asia and was recognized long ago as an odd sort of tree, revealing unusual foliage, flowers, and fruits.

It was imported into the southern U.S. back in the middle part of the 19th century and rapidly gained favor as an odd tree, perfect for planting in the middle of a sunny yard.

It has smooth, prominently green stems and twigs, which tend to be much thicker than the twigs on most trees commonly seen. Older plants, after attaining some size, will have smooth, streaked, gray bark, which is attractive.

The foliage is spectacular. Each leaf includes a major- league stalk, up to three feet long, and with a flamboyant, bright green blade up to two feet across. The blades of very well developed leaves tend to be deeply lobed, often with five to seven deeply divided portions, which form fingery projections on a big green hand.

The leaves are completely deciduous, which means raking in the fall. The winter plants are attractive in a strange sort of skeletal green- stick way. The flowers, though small, are fragrant and held in clusters in the summer, and bees like them.

Many of the flowers drop before setting fruit. The surviving flower ovaries mature and swell into unusual papery capsules that ultimately split open, still held together at the base, and become star- shaped bearing a series of small seeds along the inner margins of the divisions.

The seeds are good at sprouting, and for this reason the plants tend to get weedy. Not only that, older trees will frequently sprout at the base, which sometimes is more than most home gardeners would have wanted.

If you want one of these trees but can't wait for it to grow from seed you can take one of the fresh, green branches, sharpen it at the end, and jab it down into the soil.

This species of the mystery plant is somewhat related to the same tropical plant that gives us chocolate. And, it is a bit more distantly related, the botanists say, to hollyhocks and okra.

Answer to this week's mystery plant [Answer: "Parasol tree," Firmiana simplex]

Dr. John Nelson is the curator of the USC Herbarium. To learn more about the Herbarium, call 777-8196. The

department also offers free plant identification.

www.herbarium.org