Any day now I’ll visit a certain meadow with its bordering woods.
My specific destination—a 45-minute drive from the house—lies about a half-mile back from the county road, near the top of a gentle knoll.
It’s a good place any time of the year to spend a contemplative hour watching wildlife while ruminating upon life’s imponderables.
A jump-across brook snakes along one edge of the old field a hundred yards below—paralleling the blacktopped byway where I’d parked. A multiflora hedge runs all the way up the hillside to the edge of woods—a thorny maze that is home to groundhogs and blacksnakes, and provides sheltering cover for nesting birds.
I plan to sit awhile on one of the sun-warmed glacial erratics. Surrounded by May’s lush green grass, I’ll listen to the melodies of birdsong and enjoy the view.
But that’s not why I visit.
You could rightly call this annual outing an olfactory pilgrimage. I’m here to purposefully intoxicate and delight my sense of smell—to fill my nose with the sweet, heady perfume of black locust.
The woods at the top of the knoll are bordered by 40-50 enormous black locust. As big a stand of huge black locust as I’ve ever encountered.
When these many majestic locust trees are in gaudy bloom, they truly fill the soft spring air with the season’s most wonderful fragrance—arguably the most delightful scent you can sniff during any season.
May is flowering time for black locust, a divinely glorious event I set a reminder for on my calendar—and make my mission to savor to the fullest every year.
Black locust is a locally common native species, and not to be confused with honey locust. Similar, but different genera. Both, however, are members of the legume family—flowering plants with over 14,000 recognized species worldwide.
Trees in the legume family usually fruit via a pea- or bean-like pod containing a single or several seeds. Black locust, honey locust, redbuds, Kentucky coffee trees, and the rarely encountered yellowwood, all sport these distinctive seedpods.
Honey locust trees sport a scary armament of long, lethal-looking spines. Black locust also have thorns—or “prickles” as the botanists sometimes call them—but they’re much smaller, perhaps a half-inch in length, and far fewer in number.
Black locust and honey locust do bloom about the same time, and their clusters of white, pea-like flowers are somewhat similar. Yet one sniff and you can quickly discern the difference.
The loose, hanging flower clusters of a black locust are so incredibly fragrant, that you’ll often get a sudden whiff of their strong, distinctive fragrance as you drive along the highway with your windows down. You can regularly smell them from a hundred yards away.
More than once, when making this annual visit, I caught their sublime scent the moment I stepped from my vehicle—a full half-mile distance from where I parked to their knoll-top castellation! Not because I have the nose of a bloodhound, mind you, but simply due to being downhill with the airflow in my favor.
Possibly more extraordinary, you might actually hear a blooming black locust before you see or smell it! No kidding!
For those who’ve never heard a gazillion bees buzzing in unison, a mellifluous susurration, you’d be amazed at the volume such an excited insectile horde can manage. A stand of blooming black locust—or just a single tree—being energetically attended by an incalculable feeding swarm of busy bees—all intoxicated with the powerful sweet scent, and humming with collective rapture—elicits a sound you can hear an astonishing ways off!
If you can find it, one of the tastiest “single bloom” wild honeys—and staggeringly expensive!—is produced from the floral nectar of black locust.
Hummingbirds, like bees, also adore and work the beautiful black locust flowers.
The wood of black locust is hard, heavy, and durable, and was once avidly sought for shipbuilding, used to make the wood nails which pinned the hull’s planks to the keel and ribs. A lot of American black locust timber was exported to England for just that purpose during the 19th century.
Black locust has a legendary reputation when employed as fence posts because even when set in wet ground, a locust post will last fifty or more years.
Several years ago, a forester friend asked me to name my favorite Ohio trees. I ticked off sycamore, white oak, swamp maple, paw-paw, hemlock, shagbark hickory, and sassafras, and surprised him some by adding ironwood, sweet birch, and osage orange. But what seemingly bewildered the fellow was my inclusion of black locust.
“Why black locust?” he challenged.
“Because,” I said, “no tree in the woods smells better.”
I stick by that assessment and reasoning—the sumptuous, honey-sweet aroma of blooming black locust is one of nature’s greatest smells. Better than spicebush, wild roses, bee balm, water lilies, musk thistle, or sweet clover.
Originally limited to the Appalachians and surrounding foothills, including Ohio, the species has become naturalized throughout the U.S. and Europe. Black locust thrives in waste places—old fields and disturbed areas, roadside banks, the edges of paved lots, and bulldozed corners of housing projects. They’re fast-growing and capable of adapting to almost any sort of soil, including mine tailings, which is why they’re often the species of choice for strip-mine reclamation. A true pioneer.
This means black locust are tucked away practically everywhere—easy to find, easy to sniff—though many folks seldom notice the trees except during their bloom period. But then, unless their eyes and nose are both on the fritz, the ubiquitous black locust in full showy bloom and pumping scent like a perfumery is impossible to miss.
I’ll gladly walk the half-mile back to my favorite hilltop black locust patch. They’re the best spring tonic I know—a feast for the eyes, beauty for the nose, and a potent restorative for my soul.
Reach Jim McGuire at [email protected].
