Kentucky Coffee Tree

Kentucky Coffee Tree — The Kentucky Coffeetree, Gymnocladus dioicus, is a tree in the subfamily Caesalpinioideae of the pea family Fabaceae, native to the midwest of North America. The range is limited, occurring from the far south of Ontario, Canada and in the United States from Kentucky (where it was first encountered by Europeans) and western Pennsylvania in the east, to Kansas,eastern Nebraska, and southeastern South Dakota in the west, and to northern Louisiana in the south. It was formerly the state tree of Kentucky.

Varies from seventy-five to one hundred feet high with a trunk two or three feet in diameter which usually separates ten or fifteen feet from the ground into three or four divisions which spread slightly and form a narrow pyramidal head; or when crowded by other trees, sending up one tall central branchless shaft to the height of fifty or seventy feet. Branches stout, pithy, and blunt; roots fibrous.

Like the Sumac this is totally destitute of fine spray, its smaller branches are thick, blunt, clumsy and lumpish. Other trees lose their leaves but along their twigs and branchlets are borne the buds, the hope and the promise of the coming year. But the Gymnocladus seems so destitute of these, that the French in Canada named it Chicot, the dead tree. Even when spring comes it gives no apparent recognition of light and warmth until nearly every other tree is in full leaf. The casual observer says it bears no winter buds, but there is a tiny pair, wrapped in down and woll, lying sleeping in the axil of every last year’s leaf.