It is April 11th and the weather is gorgeous. Today's temperature peaked in the upper 70s, winds are mildly breezy, and overhead there were deep blue skies traversed by scattered clouds. Dogwoods, Redbuds and Tulips are in full bloom, tree pollen is flying around with reckless abandon, and things that are green are growing like they've been asleep for six months. What better thing to do on a glorious spring afternoon than to spend two hours of it on the first lawn-mowing of the year?
No, it's not really ideal but I didn't have a choice.
Against my expectations, neither my little push mower nor my ride-on Snapper hesitated in the least to start their spring duties. One pull of the ripcord roused them from peaceful slumber into a load roar of activity. Most of my lawn-shortening time went without amusing incident. Huge weeds here, dog doo there, nice mowing pattern over there. It was all business as usual... until I got near the tree:
Liquidambar styracifula
In English, that's an American Sweetgum. Overall it's an attractive plant and not a bad choice for a mid-size shade tree. Nice texture, interestingly shaped shiny green leaves, and great fall color. The bad thing? It drops seeds. Big seeds: spiky-ball thingies.
If you want to get all technical, you can call them globose multicapsular compound fruiting bodies. I call them annoying.
One seed? Annoying? Sure, they're big. And spiky. But how annoying could just one seed be? One seed would be fine. One dozen? Fine still. One hundred? Sure, I can handle that. But as it is, just one tree can drop multiple hundreds if not thousands of these seeds over the course of the winter.
They wouldn't be so bad if lawnmowers could just pick them up and shred 'em. But no, that doesn't happen. Those things are hard enough that when you run over them, the lawnmower will just suck them up and launch them out the discharge chute with enough force to leave a welt on any unfortunate bystanders.
They also cause loud knocking noises; imagine what it might sound like when balloons made of aluminum were popped. Running over dozens at a time gives the feeling of turning your big, powerful, manly lawn mower from this:
Into this:
Trees have power. Be wary.
