This week while I was cutting some ash trees, I knocked a small limb out of a cucumber tree. That thing was LOADED with the fruit/seed pods - there must have been nearly a hundred on the ground and attached to the limb that came down. I took a couple photos and carried one home to show my youngest grandson today. He looked at it in my hand and said, "Pap, what kind of animal did THAT come from?!" I'm still not sure if he believes me that it came from a tree. LOL. Cucumber trees aren't a rarity here, but they're not real common either. They tend to be scattered around in hardwood stands. Mills buy the sawlogs at the same price as tulip poplar, and the lumber (from my limited experience with it) seems pretty similar to poplar.
I googled cucumber tree and came up with this for Canada. We don't have them out here on the coast. Cucumber tree
They're getting close. This tree is in the Magnolia family, so once the actual seeds are ripe the pod itself dessicates and shrinks and "releases" the ripe seeds: Yes, aliens, JD Guy! This image was stolen off the internet, not my photo. These trees, as I said, are usually just sparsely scattered through hardwood forests in the Appalachians, with some spread east and west from there but not far. So they don't seem to be widely known. A close cousin, the Fraser magnolia, has an even smaller range limited primarily to the central Appalachian highlands. The cucumber tree is often overlooked in mature forests with tall canopies because the bark looks a lot like ash, tulip poplar, and some hickories. The Fraser magnolia bark looks much different, smoother like a birch or even some firs. Both are in the same genus as ornamental magnolias. The cucumber is Magnolia acuminata and the Fraser magnolia is Magnolia fraseri. Probably more than you wanted to know, but I think these are both interesting, overlooked trees.
