Cottonwoods play key role in environment

A year or so ago, I wrote an article on cottonwood trees for the Scotchman Peaks Newsletter. For a few years I had enjoyed providing educational articles for the quarterly — generally on native plants common to the Scotchman wilderness area. It occurred to me that the information in some of those columns might prove of interest to Bee readers, and the cottonwood story decided me to share at least part of it. Our area is blessed with many of these big trees, often undeservedly maligned.

A decade or more has passed since the University of Idaho owned and maintained a satellite facility in the woods behind Clark Fork. It was staffed by UI professors who provided professional workshops/classes featuring hands-on experts in gardening, wild gardens, wildcrafting, nature, and much more in a beautiful environment.

One of the classes was on obtaining valuable natural “usables” from wild plants: Arnica salve, soap from Saponaria (“soap bush”), and healing balm from the Cottonwood — generally in our area, Populus trichocarpa or black cottonwood. For this latter the instructor showed us how to use a simple canner to distil the fragrant pitch from cottonwood sprigs using those pitchy tips that drop in profusion early each spring (all over your car and walkways) for the resulting “Balm of Gilead” which protects, heals and is pretty much an all-encompassing topical medication. During those sessions I fell in love with the big, handsome trees.

Since my own surroundings hold a sizeable cottonwood population, like-minded friends from the classes joined me each spring in harvesting branch tips for making the balm.

It was then that I read Jeff Hart’s classic paperback book “Montana: Native Plants and Early Peoples,” which reported that the Plains Indians along with Flathead, Kutenai and Blackfeet, revered the cottonwood, relishing the sweet inner bark and sap. They fed twigs to their stock, rubbed themselves with the sap to conceal their human scent during war parties, and obtained colors and dyes from the buds as well.

Some tribes applied whole leaves as a poultice for bruises, boils and sores on themselves as well as their horses, saying that it drew the pus from infections. Others drank tea from the bark for tuberculosis, syphilis and whooping cough, and believed it good for colds. It also made (and makes) good firewood, burning cleanly and leaving only a fine ash. Women made good use of the “cotton” that bursts from the falling seed pods in summertime for diaper lining and or baby-bedding warmth/softness.

So it would seem that our modern-day “discovery” of the healing properties of cottonwood was intimately known and used long before, which actually gives it more credence.

But with all of cottonwood’s beauty and benefits, many malign it, with some large companies cutting it down in great numbers for grinding into wood chips. This is a real shame, since it has been categorized as a “keystone” species, which recognizes its usefulness in its growing area by providing food, shelter, and/or enhancing other facets of the surroundings. It is a “water lover” and will be found in or near lakes, creeks, ponds, fens and seeps in forest or meadow.

Our common black cottonwood is the largest of the Populus species and impossible to mistake. Its unique clean, sweet fragrance, thick leathery heart-shaped (lanceolate) leaves, finely toothed marginally, are 3- to 7-inches long and 3-4 inches wide, dark green above and lighter beneath (a beautiful picture looking up from below when the sun is shining through them).

The early-years trunks start out smoothly grey-green, thickening to deep-furrowed bark in the aged giants, which can grow to 120 feet tall. They have a sweet, fresh scent, which savvy woods-people recognize as the nearness of water, perhaps one of the reasons they have been listed as one of the safer trees for fire-resistant landscaping

I recall a many years-ago experience, when hiking in the hills with my then 8-year-old son; he suddenly exclaimed “I smell water!” Over the next knoll we came upon a beautiful grove of fragrant cottonwoods — the “water” he had smelled. Though there was no stream or pond in sight, I knew it was close by, for the water-loving cottonwoods exuded its scent from their very trunks and leaves.

On “my” small natural acreage, the cottonwoods co-exist with red and white fir, Ponderosa pine (overtopping them all as per my photo), a variety of smaller trees/shrubs — Cascara, Rocky-Mountain maple, Mountain and Green ash, Serviceberry, Elderberry and Sumac — just as one finds them growing in moister areas of the forest. And that last sentence points out the main hallmark of the cottonwood — nearby moisture. Here, Sand Creek is only an acre away.

Valle Novak writes the Country Chef and Weekend Gardener columns for the Daily Bee. She can be reached at bcdailybee@bonnercountydailybee.com or by phone at 208-265-4688.