Centuries-old trees at Bartram's struck

Trees are like family at Bartram's Garden. You'll hear affectionate talk of "the ginkgo" or "the cedar," and everyone knows exactly which tree you mean.

So, in the middle of Thursday's violent thunderstorm, when head custodian Bill Butler rushed into the office and blurted out, "The yellowwood is down," everyone gasped, then fell silent. This two-century-old favorite had just been struck by lightning.

"It's one of those things you hear about and know is true, but you don't want to believe it," said Louise Turan, executive director of the garden, who described her staff as "heartbroken."

By Friday morning, Butler was counting some blessings. "The Bartrams must've been looking out for us," he said.

Although the yellowwood survived, it looked like a car crash, all jagged tips, stress fractures, and butchered branches. And somehow, the falling limbs did no damage to the historic stone house, beyond setting off the motion sensors inside. While this and other toppled trees constituted the worst storm damage anyone could remember in decades, there was so much conversation about the yellowwood's surviving that you had to believe.

"Yellowwoods seem to have this incredible capacity to regrow themselves, even that one," said Joel Fry, Bartram's curator. He noted an 1890 photograph of the tree after it had obviously been damaged, showing "a little stump twig that grew back to be that enormous tree."

Fry also said he was not surprised that "that enormous tree" was almost destroyed in Thursday's storm because, while it may have looked fine on the outside, it was rotted and hollow on the inside. To stave off trouble, staff had wired some of the branches together.

"For over 10 years, I've expected something like this to happen. I wondered what was holding it together," said Fry, an archaeologist and Bartram scholar.

Located at 54th Street and Lindbergh Boulevard in Southwest Philadelphia, the garden was founded in 1728 by John Bartram, a farmer, naturalist, nurseryman, and plant collector known as the father of American botany. It was a showplace for North American plants.

The 60-foot-tall yellowwood, Fry said, was probably collected in Tennessee by the French plant explorer Andre Michaux and brought by Michaux's son to William Bartram around 1800.

William Bartram was a plant explorer like his inquisitive father, who died in 1777, and at that time, the yellowwood would have been a rare and valuable tree, the first in the Philadelphia area.

On Friday, if you looked up, you'd never know there had been a storm. The sky was clear and blue; birds were flitting in full-throated song. But destruction was everywhere. The garden was closed to the public and will remain so this weekend while the cleanup continues, although two weddings, one Saturday and one Sunday, were still a go.

Branches filled the driveway and littered the garden, blocking paths and making exploration - usually a delightful option - treacherous. Sections of the garden were roped off, while staff members sawed fallen branches to load into a pickup truck, and hauled smaller debris away in wheelbarrows.

Besides the yellowwood damage, an 80-foot-tall cucumber magnolia, 170 years old, was upended, creating a 12-foot-square crater. A saddened Turan brightened to relate "a really cool thing" discovered in the midst of it all.

After the storm, Turan and Fry were standing by the crater when Fry noticed two pieces of stone. One was a piece of flinted jasper used to make prehistoric tools; the other was a fire-baked stone that American Indians heated, put in a basket, and used for cooking. Fry estimates they could be 3,000 years old.

"This soil has not been disturbed in thousands of years," Turan said. "How amazing is that?"

Also amazing, she said, is the yellowwood, known botanically as Cladrastis kentukea. In recognition of its adaptable personality and longevity, it was chosen in 1994 by the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society as a "gold medal plant." Winners are underappreciated plants that the society considers exceptional additions to home gardens.

There are actually three yellowwoods in the Bartram garden. Butler named them "the granddaddy, the daddy, and junior."

The granddaddy, a fulsome 20 feet around the middle, took the hit Thursday. Butler called it "my go-to tree, my tree of conversation, the tree I tell visitors about."

Like wisteria, the yellowwood's flower clusters are long, 14 inches or so, and pendulous. The blossoms are white and fragrant, but the tree does not bloom profusely every year. This spring, by all accounts, was an outstanding show.

It may take a while for an arborist to clean up the tree and for the tree to regenerate, which Fry estimates could take from 10 to 20 years. But this crew believes the Bartram yellowwood is going to make it.

"This baby," Butler said, "ain't going nowhere."