Trouble Afoot!: Tung Blossoms

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Tung Blossoms

you're wandering in the woods while the dogwoods and Cherokee roses are blooming, you might also spot the blossoms of a Chinese tung tree.

Huge groves of tung trees were planted in north Florida at one time as part of a flourishing tung oil industry. I never thought of them as a flowering plant until I ran across a blooming tung tree in Maclay Gardens State Park in the spring of 1978. "I know where there are acres of these!" I babbled to the girl I was with. We drove east to Jefferson County, where we parked the car and strolled through a tung orchard, white flowers falling down around us like soft rain. It was very Disneyesque.

Since then Florida's tung orchards have been bulldozed and the land has become pasture, planted pines, or suburbs, and there are few traces of the once-thriving tung oil industry. Tung first came to Florida in 1906. The poisonous green "nuts" that the trees produced were crushed and an oil was extracted, useful in the manufacture of paints and varnishes. World War II cut off the supply of tung oil from China (where tung trees had been cultivated for four millennia) and the Florida industry boomed like never before. By the 1950s 12,000 acres of Jefferson County alone were planted in tung trees. But then synthetic oils and soybean oil began to replace tung oil. During the 1970s the last of Florida's tung mills went silent and the domestic tung oil industry was gone.

For a few years, outside of Capps you could see an imposing "TUNGSTON" sign for the old Tungston Plantation, but it was demolished when US 19 was widened. You can still find a vagrant tung tree in the woods, though, often in a location surprisingly far from the original orchards. Soon, someone will probably declare them an invasive species, but in the meantime enjoy the flowers (and don't eat the nuts).

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