Question

Which plant is described by these clues? Every flower opens without a single {petal} or {sepal} — just a tuft of {stamens}, or a bare two-lobed {stigma}, seated behind one small toothed {bract}. It is {dioecious}: any one tree bears only male or only female {catkins}, so half the population never sets a fruit. Each ripe {capsule} splits into two {valves} and lets go of seeds so fine they drift away on tufts of white silky floss. Winter buds are sheathed in several overlapping scales and varnished with a sticky, sweetly balsamic {resin}. Across temperate Europe honeybees strip that bud varnish and supply most of the resin they work into propolis, the glue that seals a hive. Its blades are broad, nearly as wide as they are long, and each hangs from a {petiole} flattened edgewise, so the whole crown shivers in air too still to feel. In March and April, well before a single leaf unfurls, male {catkins} 2 to 3 inches (5 to 7.5 cm) long swing from bare twigs on crimson {anthers}. In the wild it is a floodplain tree of damp gravelly riverbanks, ranging from northwest Africa and the Mediterranean through Europe into southwest and central Asia. Leaves are {rhombic}, roughly 2 to 3 inches (5 to 8 cm) long, plain green and hairless on both faces, with no warty {glands} where the blade meets its stalk. The species epithet is simply the Latin word for black, taken from the dark, deeply furrowed bark that old trunks carry, often knobbed with heavy burrs. Nineteenth-century pharmacists macerated its resinous buds into an anodyne ointment for aching joints, and drew from its bark both salicin and a second bitter glycoside named after the genus itself. Its most-planted selection is a single male {clone} grown from cuttings since the early 1700s, a pencil-narrow column 40 to 60 feet (12 to 18 m) tall but only 10 to 15 feet (3 to 4.5 m) wide, set in ranks along drives and field boundaries from Europe to Australia.

Accepted Answer

Populus nigra 'Italica'

Name That Plant #096