Golden Rain Tree ( Koelreuteria paniculata) at Chelsea Physic Garden

Dear Readers, one of the joys of this blog has been the amazing people that I’ve met, not just in East Finchley, but all over the world. On Monday I went on an expedition to Chelsea Physic Garden with my friend JD – I haven’t been there for probably thirty years. What a wonderful place it is! And, in full glory at the moment, is the Golden Rain tree.

What you can’t see until you get close up is that the ‘fruits’ of the tree are tiny bladders or lanterns, making this a very unusual tree. It is becoming increasingly popular as a street tree, as not only does it have these ‘pods’, but it has yellow flowers in spring, impressive early foliage, and the pods darken to shades of deep orange in the autumn. Plus, it’s a relatively small tree, so could fit in any large-ish garden (though I suspect that the pollinators would prefer it if you planted a crab apple or cherry. Or even a hawthorn)

You might think, from looking at the tree, that it’s a member of the bean family, but no! It belongs to the ‘soap-berry’ family, the Sapindaceae, which includes trees such as the horse chestnut, the maples, and the lychee tree. Why soap-berry, though? One thought is that it relates to the milky sap of some of the plants in this family, but I remain a little sceptical.

Golden Rain tree flowers (Photo By Didier Descouens – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119770021)

The tree comes originally from China, Mongolia and South Korea, which makes one of its other names, ‘Pride of India’, a little confusing. Still, it is a tree that’s travelled widely – it arrived in Japan as long ago as 1200, and can be found all over Europe and North America. In his book ‘London’s Street Trees’, Paul Wood describes how the tree can tolerate pollution, exposure, hard surfaces and most things that a city can throw at it – anything, in fact, except shade.

Sitting under a Golden Rain Tree is supposed to make you fall in love with whoever you’re sitting with, allegedly – a 1957 film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Montgomery Clift, and DeForest Kelley (yes, that DeForest Kelley – ‘I’m a doctor, not a bricklayer, Jim’) was a tale of a Professor in Civil War Indiana falling in lurve inconveniently, mediated by the tree.

In Japan, the tree is associated with scholars, and is often grown close to their tombs. As the tree was mainly used medicinally to treat eye complaints, you can see how somebody studying texts for hours at a time, often in failing light, would have appreciated the plant, and how the connection with those who study might have grown.

Photo by Mauro Halpern (https://www.flickr.com/photos/mauroguanandi/3376028300)

Is this tree edible? Well, apparently the young shoots can be boiled and eaten like spinach, but the seeds are acidic, and the plant contains cyanide, so you might want to give it a miss. On the other hand, the flowers produce a yellow dye, and the mature leaves produce a black dye, so that might be a fun thing to try if you’ve some cloth or wool that you’re fed up with.

And here’s a poem, by Sylvia Plath no less. I found it sensual, but confusing. And my botanist self frequently had to pause and scratch her head. See what you think.

The Beekeeper’s Daughter by Sylvia Plath

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black
The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.
Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,
A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.
Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,
You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.
The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.
In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red
The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings
To father dynasties. The air is rich.
Here is a queenship no mother can contest —

A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees
Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down
I set my eyes to a hole-mouth and meet an eye
Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.
Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg
Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.