http://www.fastgrowingtree.com/indexT2.htm
Found on the left side at the link above.
We chose a Royal Empress Tree because when i googled (now officially a word in the Dictionary I believe) when I googled draught tolerant trees for my growing zone it returned only three. two were in the fir/pine family and as I'm allergic to several of those, including the Australian Pine in our yard already, I figured those were easy "no's". The only one left was the Royal Empress Tree.(Here you can see my foot -a size 7 for those who must know- next to the tree. It has 10 leaves at this point but you cannot see some of them underneath the large ones on the far side.)
It arrived on a Monday , hmmm lets see if I can figure out which Monday. Choco died Saturday the 9th, there is no way it arrived on 11th so therefore the earliest it could have been here was the 18th of June. it had to sit out in the yard in the shade (under a table LOL) to aclimate itself and then slowly Neal moved it out into the yard. For some reason I think this was two weeks, or just shy of two weeks time. At any rate, it went in the ground on either June 24th or July 1st. When it arrived it had only two leaves, large-ish but drooping down the stem/trunk that was only about 6" high and not even as big around as 1/2 of my little finger!
(Here you see it from above looking much larger than you would expect it to get in what, three weeks?soon it was sprouting two new leaves about every 5 days! When I went in to tell Neal that 11 and 12 had shown up as wee buds at the top between the last two leaves to come in the other leaves had begun to get very large!
(As you can see here! The leaf my hand is on actually has another 3 -4 inches of leaf off from where my fingertips end!)Now looking at this same picture, just to the right of my wrist between the smaller leaves showing, are the buds for #11 and #12.
On Monday, July 16th (Brother in Law Brian's 50th B'day and Neal's first day at the new job) it now had 20 something leaves! It has begun to get buds at the base of all the stems the 1-12 leaves are on the "trunk"! It is a riot to watch and I'm so pleased that we chose this tree to grow never having seen another one in our entire lives! So brave we are.
I hope I remember to snap a picture of it tonight with all of the new buds coming out. the best way I can describe them is they look like the "sucker" leaves tomato plants get that they tell you to pinch off. I don't want to pinch these off until I know for sure they should be. Surely there is a world of difference between a tomato plant and this gigantic-to-be Empress Tree?
So here are the pics finally of the lovely tree we planted after Choco died. He is right next to Snicker and they will end up being directly to the left of the tree as I look out into the yard from my sewing studio window.
Have a grand and glorious day all,
denise/deBRAT in too hot, too humid, but thankfully we're still IN Florida!
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