the.com/cottonwood
the fast-living giant that snows in summer and dies young by tree standards
means A large, fast-growing North American poplar tree whose seeds are carried on tufts of cottony white fluff that drift through the air in early summer.
from A plain settler's compound of "cotton" and "wood" — English colonists in North America simply named the tree for the cotton-like fluff that floats from its seedpods, no Latin scholar required. "Cotton" itself reached English through Old French from Arabic "qutn," the word that traveled west with the cloth trade. The tree belongs to the genus Populus, the poplars, a name the Romans used; "cottonwood" is the homespun American answer to it, coined by people watching the summer snow and calling it what they saw.
- summer snow
- Females release cotton-fluffed seeds that drift like blizzards
- speed demon
- Grows up to 6 feet in a single year
- short life
- Rarely lives past 100 despite massive size
- thirsty roots
- Marks underground water for desert travelers
- talking leaves
- Flattened stalks make foliage rustle in faintest breeze
cottonwood creek wyoming — a stream in converse county, wyoming, known for cottonwood-lined banks and used in regional water management
cottonwood california — an unincorporated community in shasta county, california, with historic gold rush heritage from the 1850s