Most of my childhood and youth in Winnipeg, Manitoba, there was a weed tree everywhere, called Manitoba Maple.  I never knew what it was, and over the years I’ve kind of thought about it. But never enough to find out more about it.   It was just a big, ungainly deciduous tree that seemed to thrive in the awful cold and extreme heat that was Manitoba in the winter and the summer.

Now I’m in Kansas, and I’ve spent a huge amount of thought trying to find something – a shade tree — that would grow fast, take extreme cold, extreme heat, occasional drenching downpours with brief standing water.

Well, I’m no Agatha Christie, so you’ve probably guessed what I ended up with.

It turns out that Manitoba Maple is actually Acer Negundo, known here as Box Elder.  And now there are ten of them in my new Woodland Walk.