Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Its genus name is the plain classical Latin word for this tree, a word that doubles as the Latin for the people, because the Romans planted it around the squares where crowds gathered. Every one of its flowers is stripped of petals and sepals, sitting behind a small fringed {bract} in a hanging tassel, and male and female tassels are carried on entirely separate trees. The subspecies epithet is built from the Greek words for hair and for fruit, and its nearly globular seed pods split into three parts rather than the two of the eastern race. The species epithet means bearing a fragrant healing resin, which is exactly what varnishes the long-pointed winter buds. Each winter bud is wrapped in six or seven overlapping scales, and the broad blades ride on long slender stalks so the whole crown moves in the lightest wind. It is the dominant streamside tree of Pacific Northwest lowlands, rooting on gravel bars, floodplains and wet bottomlands from sea level to about 7,500 feet (2,300 m). On the first warm days of spring the {resin} volatilises and carries a sweet, honeyed, faintly medicinal scent right across a river valley. Its leaves are glossy dark green above and silvery-white beneath, often smeared rust-brown where resin has run, so a gust turns an entire crown two-toned. At 80 to 150 feet (24 to 46 m) tall it is the largest broadleaf tree in western North America, adding up to 60 inches (150 cm) a year on wet ground, with soft brittle wood that drops limbs in storms. Northwest peoples boiled its bud resin for sore throats, coughs and rheumatism, made soap from the inner bark, and worked the light wood into canoes, fish traps and baskets. In 2006 it became the first tree of any kind to have its genome fully sequenced, picked as the model woody plant for bioenergy research, and its female trees fill Pacific Northwest river air with drifting white seed-down every June.

Accepted Answer

Populus balsamifera ssp. trichocarpa

Name That Plant #080