{"id":3306,"date":"2021-02-01T07:11:48","date_gmt":"2021-02-01T15:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3306"},"modified":"2021-02-01T07:11:48","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T15:11:48","slug":"what-ever-happened-to-lombardy-poplar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/what-ever-happened-to-lombardy-poplar\/","title":{"rendered":"What Ever Happened to Lombardy Poplar?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lombardy<\/a>The house where I grew up was sold to another family right after I got married, so my memories of the place have grown rosy-tinted over time.\u00a0 One thing is certain.\u00a0 The back garden was bounded by eight tall Lombardy poplar trees.\u00a0 My father loved them and they were everywhere in my hometown.\u00a0 Now they have gone the way of the elm and the American chestnut.\u00a0 More of them linger in old photos than in modern landscapes.<\/p>\n

A mature Lombardy poplar grows\u00a0 40 to 50 feet tall, but the columnar form means that its spread is only about 10 to 15 feet.\u00a0 As the variety name suggests, the trees stand like punctuation points in the landscape, and have long been used as borders or to flank driveways or roads.\u00a0 The trees are deciduous, but the green leaves turn an attractive buttery yellow in the fall before disappearing for the winter.\u00a0 The impressive upright structure remains stark and beautiful during the cold months.<\/p>\n

Lombardy poplar or Populus nigra \u2018Italica\u2019 is descended from trees native to Europe, North Africa and Russia.\u00a0 The species\u2019 origins are somewhat murky, but it may have appeared in the Lombardy region of Italy as early as the 1600\u2019s as a natural mutation of the black poplar.\u00a0 As a member of the useful, incredibly hardy and large willow or Salix family, it would have been very easy to propagate from cuttings, which may account for its quick spread through Europe and ultimate, to America.<\/p>\n

Lombardies are sometimes called \u201cMormon poplar\u201d or \u201cMormon tree\u201d because Mormon settlers planted them as windbreaks and boundary markers as they moved west in the mid-nineteenth century.\u00a0 Author Wallace Stegner noted this in his elegiac 1942 book Mormon Country.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/em>The Mormons and generations of Americans through the nineteen fifties and sixties loved the fact that Lombardies grew at an amazing rate.\u00a0 They were equally useful as shade trees and windbreaks for early farmsteads, as well as being appropriate complements to the Italian villa-style houses that were popular as the nineteenth century turned to the twentieth.\u00a0 Later on, the trees\u2019 rapid growth contributed a sense of nearly-instant permanence to the fast growing suburbs of mid-century America.\u00a0 Landscapers used them so much that they became ubiquitous.<\/p>\n

In spite of that rampant popularity, very few Lombardies dot the American landscape now.<\/p>\n

Why did they disappear?\u00a0 They did not suffer the fate of chestnuts and elms, dying out en masse from a single disease or blight.\u00a0 They were, however, subject to a number of flaws that led to a precipitous decline in popularity.<\/p>\n

The flip side of the Lombardy\u2019s fast-growing nature is that the trees are short-lived; dying within 30 or 40 years of planting\u2014if they don\u2019t succumb to aphids, borers or canker before that.\u00a0 The wood is weak and easily broken in storms.\u00a0 Like so many willow family members, Lombardies are shallow-rooted and prone to forming root suckers easily.\u00a0 Those roots and suckers mean they are likely to uproot sidewalks, infiltrate pipes, interfere with lawn maintenance, and cause other mayhem in home landscapes.<\/p>\n

They also dislike hot sticky summer weather, so prevalent in many parts of the United States.<\/p>\n

Poplars in general are often called \u201ccottonwood trees\u201d for the cottony material that aids the seeds\u2019 voyage to the ground, sticking to houses, cars and other trees as they flutter down.\u00a0 Female Lombardies produce lots of \u201ccotton\u201d and make a mess.\u00a0 You can avoid that by buying male trees, which are free of \u201ccotton\u201d, but are also laden with allergy-causing pollen.<\/p>\n

The best that tree experts can say of Lombardies now is that they may\u00a0 be useful planted in front of slower-growing trees to provide short term landscape emphasis and shade.\u00a0 By the time the poplars succumb to ailments or age, the permanent trees will have reached respectable heights, allowing for any remaining Lombardies to be removed.<\/p>\n

My father, who loved Lombardies, also loved the Latin phrase \u201csic transit Gloria mundi\u201d–“so passes the glory of this world”.\u00a0 That is perhaps the best epitaph for the once popular Lombardy popular.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The house where I grew up was sold to another family right after I got married, so my memories of the place have grown rosy-tinted over time.\u00a0 One thing is certain.\u00a0 The back garden was bounded by eight tall Lombardy poplar trees.\u00a0 My father loved them and they were everywhere in my hometown.\u00a0 Now they … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[2448,1057,2451,2446,2449,2450,2447,1478,2452],"class_list":["post-3306","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-black-poplar","tag-historic-trees","tag-landmark-accents","tag-lombardy-poplar","tag-mormon-poplar","tag-mormon-tree","tag-populus-nigra-italica","tag-shade-trees","tag-willow-family"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3306"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3308,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3306\/revisions\/3308"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}