The mountains here light up in Spring with brilliant purple and pink blossoms. Redbud wakes up and lets everyone know about it, and we’re grateful for the colorful sign before they turn to bean-like seedpods. Heart-shaped leaves follow the flowers on the twisting branches. Not only are the flowers beautiful, but they’re an abundant early Spring nectar source, high in pollen protein, for a host of bees, butterflies, and hummingbirds. They’re also edible and nutritious for us! We like adding the pea-flavored flowers to salads and sprinkled on cakes. Southern Appalachian recipes call them the “spicewood tree” and use green twigs to season venison and possum, which comes from Indigenous cuisines that have used them raw or boiled, and also cooked and pickled young seedpods, which are also enjoyed by deer, cardinals, bobwhites, and other birds, even if their not their first choice when given other options! Native medicine-making has made tea from boiled bark to treat whooping cough while roots and inner bark served as medicine for fever, congestion, and vomiting.

Redbud likes woodland understories and edges. We often find them growing along roadsides and streambanks, which is where we’re planting them for beauty, Spring pollination, and emergency fodder for livestock after observing goat and deer occasionally snacking on them. Unlike most leguminous trees, Redbud doesn’t transform atmospheric nitrogen into the soil, but we can’t all do everything!

We propagate our Redbud from seeds we gather from shapely vigorous trees.