Keeping invasives off our place - Haiku - On finding a couple of awesome plants, and upon identifying them, finding they are among the worst offenders

Keeping invasives
off our place, and then finding
some we dearly love

I spent most of today following Marek to Georgia, where he delivered his trucks, and then since I've been California Dreaming myself recently, really missing the Pacific Ocean and her grey whales, we stopped for an early dinner at California Dreaming in Kennesaw.

Behind the restaurant, where we parked the car, there was a really cool tree that we couldn't initially identify, though I thought it might well be invasive, since the first seed pod we opened had literally hundreds of seeds.

Oddly, there was also a branch with a couple of fresh blooms, odd as most of the tree was covered with maturing seed pods, and as Marek was tall enough to smell it, I asked him if it was fragrant.

He smelled the flowers, and his face was immediately overcome with a blissful look as he exclaimed that, yes indeed, it was deliciously fragrant, and when he pulled it lower for me to smell, I had to agree.

And, interestingly, in addition to the roundish nut-shaped seed pods, it also had fuzzy bean-like pods, which was again odd. So yes, we wanted seeds, and collected a number of pods.

I have a phone app called PlantNet, which helps identify local plants all over the world, though not always easily. So, initially, I checked for a tree that had fragrant purple pea-like flower clusters, with nut-shaped seed pods, and came up empty, though I did come up with a whole host of other leguminous trees that were clearly not contenders, such as locust, southern catawba and wisteria.

In any case, we finished dinner and came back out, whereupon Marek discovered, upon further examination, that the purple flowers didn't belong to the tree after all, but to the rampant vine covering the tree.

And, with this further delineation, once we got home we discovered the identities of both: the tree is Royal Pawlonia, a lovely but highly invasive tree that I've been saying a steady "hell no" to ever since we arrived in Tennessee; and the vine is kudzu, a doubly emphatic "hell no," as the prolific and freely-reseeding vine has swallowed up forests up and down the eastern third of the United States.

And so, fragrant or not, we tossed the seeds in the trash, envelope and all. No composting for these guys, as I do not want our woods swallowed up by a combination of Royal Pawlonia and kudzu, no matter how lovely they smell. ;-)

And no. I won't plant them. I won't. I will not. Ever. Though Royal Pawlonia could make an awesome bonsai.
No, no, no, NOOOO. ;-)

This post, and all those from now until the end of 2018, I am dedicating to the work of #tarc and #yah, aka @rhondak's nonprofit dog rescue and @sircork's charity @youarehope.

Half the liquid proceeds earned from my posts will be evenly split between the two organizations.

The photos above were taken by me, this evening, using my Samsung Note 8 smartphone camera.

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