Accession: 018714-0348-1979 Location: Asian Garden, Lower Asian Way Date: July 11, 2012 Photos by Wendy Cutler New leaves on these trees are pale, drooping and very hairy top and bottom. Older leaves are dark green and tough, with unusual venation. This tree is near the Rhododendron barbatum grove on Lower Asian Way.
Here's a different accession, giving an idea of the tree shape. Accession: 024986-0522-1985 Location: Asian Garden, Lower Asian Way, near Soulie Trail Date: July 11 and June 27 Photos by Wendy Cutler
Here's an update on the Neolitsea sericea. This is at the same location as posting #2, different accession. Accession: 024981-0522-1985 Location: Asian Garden, Soulie Trail below Lower Asian Way Date: September 9, 2012 The leaves are no longer fuzzy. And there are flower buds along some of the branches. Nadia thinks it might be too cold for them to develop here, but they seem developed enough to open. They have separate male and female trees, and we don't know yet which this is. No sense blaming lack of fruits on climate if they're male trees. I came across a Botany Boy article with good photos of this species.
Was being grown in the Horticulture Department greenhouse at Edmonds Community College during the 1970s.
I'm not adding much to what has been posted before, except to say that the new leaves are coming out and if you're into soft and fuzzy, now is getting to be the time to see the new Neolitsea leaves. They're just starting, still very small. I posted some male flower photos in October 2012 and 2013. I'm not confident that I've checked every tree to see if there is any female.
Today's excitement: fruits! On two of the trees on Soulie For some reason, I posted the flowers in a thread on small flowers instead of here. The ones I managed to get most in focus were males, so I guess the two farthest from Lower Asian Way on Soulie, as the fruits were on the other two. October 19, 2012 - teeny white flowers we've been waiting for | UBC Botanical Garden Forums
It's perfectly natural for women to focus on males. The fruiting may be due to the hot summer we had.
I totally forgot that I already saw ripe fruits on the Neolitsea sericea in 2015, was so excited today to see some that are not even ripe yet. We only saw two new leaves - I don't know if we're early or late for those. There is one at the Bloedel Conservatory on which the new leaves have lost almost all their softness, but it's a very different climate inside there.
I paid a visit to the Neolitsea sericea on Soulie Trail today (I corrected the spelling, as Ron B suggested below) . There are nice plump fruits, not ripe yet, and flowers, female ones first and of course on the branch with the fruits, and male in the last photo. That first photo isn't all that clear, but you can still see all the hairs on the flower corollas, particularly on the group on the right side of the photo.
Thank you - I have fixed the spelling (in several places, was not a typo, was stored wrong in my brain). I guess if I'd realized that he was probably Jean André Soulié (André Soulié - Wikipedia, pronounced soo-lee-eh), I'd have spelled it correctly. I thought there was a paper or a page that had descriptions of all the guys (they're all guys?) whose names grace the trails, but I can't find anything, maybe am imagining it.
Over in the thread for the new kid on the block, Neolitsea aciculata | UBC Botanical Garden Forums, I noted that seem to have avoided posting leaf tips on N. sericea, so I'm dealing with that now. And using that as an excuse to post more photos. This is a much larger tree than the ones I usually visit on the Soulie trail, yet I almost never notice it. This week, though, the fuzzy new yellow leaves glistened in what wasn't even sun. In the first photo, the tip of the tree is at the centre top, and it fills in between all the lighter-coloured leaves. Here are some leaf tips. Neolitsea in Flora of China @ efloras.org says "Leaf blade shortly acuminate at apex, acumen obtuse; fruit globose." I don't know what "acumen obtuse" means. The petioles are long (Flora of China says "petiole 2-3 cm", in general, seems around twice the length of those on N. aciculata, though Flora of China says the difference can be even more) and are pretty much hairless on the older leaves. There aren't hairs along the ribs on the underside of the leaves. The new leaves feel as soft as they look. Above my nail in the second photo, I was trying to show the underside of the new leaf, which is pretty much the same as the top at this point.
