Tulip Trees
All About Tulip Trees
Most people know about the tulips whose flowers are seen each year as a colorful burst of spring, but fewer know much about tulip trees. Tulip trees are members of the magnolia family and their scientific name is Liriodendron tulipifera Magnoliaceae. They are also referred to as a yellow poplar, tulip-poplar, white-popular, tuliptree (one word),and whitewood. Tulip trees are great as a shade tree, a source of food for wildlife, and they are used in making furniture and framing houses.
Tulip trees can be found throughout all of the Eastern United States. They grow in Southern New England south to the north central part of Florida. Westward, tulip trees are found in Michigan and Southern Ontario. The majority of tulip trees are found in the Appalachian Mountains and in the neighboring Piedmont region, south from Pennsylvania to Georgia.
Tulip trees grow well under many different weather conditions. For instance, they can survive New England winters where temperatures can fall to 20 below zero and still thrive in Central Florida where it rarely frosts and the average year round temperature is 60-degrees. Tulip trees also grow where there are huge differences in yearly rainfall--anywhere from thirty to eighty inches. They can be found growing in stream bottoms as low as three hundred feet about sea level, and on moist slopes up to 4,500 feet above sea level.
Tulip trees have many special qualities, including the fact that they can live for up to three hundred years. They don’t produce any flowers until they are fifteen to twenty years old, but then flower annually in the months of April, May, or June, depending on where they are located. Cones are produced to distribute seeds in the fall. Tulip trees produce a lot of seeds, anywhere from 300,000 to 1.5 million per acre. In other words, a 20-inch tulip tree can grow 3,250 cones that contain 29,000 good seeds. Trees that have been cut down or destroyed can repopulate an area very quickly.
Tulip trees grow to be among the tallest trees in the Eastern United States. They can rise as high as two hundred feet and have a circumference of eight to twelve feet. Compared to most trees, tulip trees have very few pests that cause damage. While up to thirty different pests can attack these trees, only four insects cause any significant damage. These are the tuliptree scale, yellow popular weevil, root collar borer and Columbian timber beetle. More damage can be caused by fire, logging, sleet or ice storms, birds, livestock, deer and even rabbits. They are susceptible to a few fungus diseases.
Tulip trees are excellent choices for backyards and parks that have plenty of space. They can give lots of shade thanks to their large size. They are used as lumber for a variety of furniture-making endeavors and their most recent use is as structural framing material.