Gymnocladus dioicus

Gymnocladus dioicus, the Kentucky coffeetree, is a bold, handsome native shade tree that keeps its own unhurried calendar, among the last trees to leaf out in spring and the first to stand bare in fall. That long leafless season gave the tree a curious name, which means naked branch, and the winter silhouette of thick, blunt, sculptural limbs is a feature in itself. Hillier's great manual calls the Kentucky coffeetree one of the most handsome of all hardy trees, and few who grow one would disagree.

The foliage is the tree's glory. Doubly compound and among the largest leaves of any native tree, sometimes three feet long, they unfurl a soft pink-bronze in spring, deepen to blue-green through summer, and turn clear yellow before they fall. Greenish-white flowers open in early summer, sweetly fragrant on the female trees, for the coffeetree is dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate plants.

The common name comes from the fat, leathery pods that female trees carry into winter, holding large, hard seeds in a sticky pulp. Early settlers roasted and ground those seeds into a coffee substitute, which is how the tree earned its name, but a caution is essential: the raw seeds, pods, and pulp are toxic, and only roasting was said to make them safe, so the coffee story is history, not a recipe. Nothing about the tree should ever be eaten raw.

Few large trees are as tough and trouble-free as the Kentucky coffeetree, which shrugs off drought, poor soil, city air, and cold to zone 3, growing slowly into a stately shade tree of forty to sixty feet or more. Give full sun and room, and site the tree as a specimen, a shade tree for a large lawn, or a street tree where the bold texture and winter form can be admired. For a durable, characterful native that only improves with age, the coffeetree is hard to beat.