Celtis lævigata.
Sugarberry.
Southern hackberry. To me? Just plain hackberry.
Whatever you call it, I love the tree. The way it grows, how fast it grows, the twigginess you can achieve. I like to call it the ficus of the deciduous trees.
I even love the warts on the bark (that’s where the name “hackberry” comes from. Named after a witch, or a hag, with warts, and now imagine a Scots-Irish immigrant to the USA, that guttural hard g sound, morphing into the “-ack” sound. Hag-berry to hack-berry.) they call it sugarberry in the South USA because things are always sweeter in the South. Even bittersweet melancholy is more sweet than bitter, you ever seen the movie Fried Green Tomatoes? Case in point, it’s sad and bitter, but it’s sweet, like pecan pie and vanilla ice cream on a summers afternoon, in the shade under an oak, the grass is…
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