Last summer I spend a few days at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky for my (now) brother-in-law's bachelor "party." While I was there I gathered some pods from a large Kentucky coffeetree that grew in the courtyard and shaded a raised porch that overlooked the grounds. The monks use the seeds from the pods to make rosaries. Pioneers evidently used them to make (very poor) coffee--hence the name. I thought I would try to germinate a few and grow myself a holy tree in my backyard.
Coffeetree seeds have extremely thick, hard shells that must be filed down before you plant them. You should also soak the seeds for twenty-four hours before planting. The Ketucky coffeetree is a native of the Midwest, but is pretty rare, and the hardness of the seeds' shells is the reason for its rarity. Apparently, the tree was much commoner in prehistoric times, when its pods were a favorite food of the gomphothere, a scary-looking, four-tusked, prehistoric elephant.
After all the elephants in North America went extinct, the Kentucky coffeetree had lost its preferred mode of propagation, and survived by sending out shoots until the arrival of Native Americans, who used the seeds and pods for medicinal purposes, and helped keep the species from extinction.
Another "dinosaur tree" I want to have in my yard is the dawn redwood. Redwoods used to cover most of the northern hemisphere until the last ice age wiped nearly all of them out. It was thought that only two species survived--
Sequoiadendron giganteum, the giant sequoia; and
Sequoia sempervirens, the coast redwood--until a small stand of
Metasequoia glyptostroboides, the dawn redwood, was discovered in a secluded valley in China in 1944. It has since become a popular landscape tree; I became a fan of dawn redwood through seeing it in the yards of houses I was reading the meter at.
Finally, I want to plant some quaking aspens. Besides being really pretty, the quaking aspen has contributed one of the largest organisms on earth to the world.
Pando, the Trembling Giant, is a 107-acre forest of quaking aspen that comprises a single genetic individual, spread by shoots over many thousands of years.
So, now to find a place to plant all these...
