best specimen is just east of the walkway leading from the Climatron area 
to Tower Grove House. A second species, Liriodendron chinense, occurs in 
central China. 
Tuliptree flowers, which are mostly green and come out early in the 
summer, hide among the leaves. They are large, upright, tulip-shaped, 
marked with orange inside, pollinated primarily by beetles, and similar in 
many ways to flowers on magnolias. Magnolias and tuliptrees, in fact, are 
related, both belonging to the Magnolia Family (Magnoliaceae). You may 
spot additional similarities between tuliptrees and magnolias. For 
instance, both have large “aggregate” fruits made up of numerous 
clustered subunits. In the tuliptree, the fruits persist into the winter like 
candles on the limbs and gradually break apart into winged “helicopter” 
seed-dispersal units. Magnolia seeds are dispersed differently (see write- 
up on cucumbertree, page 11). Magnolias and tuliptrees alike have 
pungent, aromatic oils, which probably helped popularize tuliptree bark 
in tonics, stimulants, and folk remedies for the heart. 
Most North American trees have tiny, highly modified leaves known 
as bud scales that protect their tender branch tips during the winter. 
Warm-climate trees, by contrast, having no need for such protection, 
generally lack bud scales. Tuliptrees and our locally cold-tolerant 
magnolias, being northern outliers of the essentially warm-climate 
Magnolia Family, have no bud scales. Instead, small, paired, green 
outgrowths (known as stipules) from the base of the leaf stalk (petiole) 
cover and protect the bud during the dormant season. In tuliptrees the 
large, green, flat stipules cover the bud conspicuously like the two halves 
of a duck’s bill. 
Liriodendron is Greek for “lily-tree” . Tulipifera refers to the tuliplike 
flowers. 
Liriodendron tulipifera 
