Paulownia

摘要

Named in honor of Queen Anna Pavlovna of The Netherlands (daughter of Tsar I of Russia), the Royal Princess tree has been known to westerners for more than 150 years. It is native to China, and now more commonly known by its botanical genus name of Paulownia. Until recently the tree was planted primarily as an ornamental flowering tree. In the U.S. P. tomentosa, the most cold-tolerant species, was widely planted in the mid-Atlantic states. When I was the wood analyst at the Winterthur museum in the 1970s, I saw several of the trees that Henry Francis duPont had planted decades earlier on this estate near Wilmington, Delaware. Over the years, Paulownia trees "escaped" from cultivation and became naturalized in the region. They were magnets for Japanese buyers. For centuries, Paulownia wood has been prized for the construction of lightweight furniture that does not damage fragile tatami floor mats in Japanese houses.