The tulip tree has my favorite scientific name, Liriodendron tulipifera. During our honeymoon, my husband and I toyed with naming the daughter we might one day have as "Little Lirio."
Individual tulip poplars can live for up to 500 years, but they seldom occur in very old forests because their saplings cannot tolerate shade. So their distribution tends to be restricted to forests that are less than a century old.
Some of the very largest tulip poplars are more than 20 feet in circumference and 100 feet tall. A wonderful cluster of them grows in a national forest in North Carolina named for the poet Joyce Kilmer, who is best-known for his short poem, "Trees." In 1914, it became one of the most popular poems in the country.
Although some of Kilmer’s critics have dismissed his poem as being overly sentimental, it seems that just about everyone knows the first line:
I think that I shall never see, a poem lovely as a tree.
Kilmer later became a soldier in World War I, and sadly, was killed by a sniper's bullet at the age of 31.
I like to think of him sitting in the shade of one of those large, straight-trunked tulip trees, observing that his tree may "in summer wear, a nest of robins in her hair."
