With something ornamental to offer each season, Kentucky coffeetree is a joy to behold throughout the year.  In winter, coffeetree branches and twigs make an impressive coarse outline against cold December skies.  The bare stems and twigs are stout and covered with bark that is rough, medium gray and appears almost swirled.  Its habit is vertical with branches that ascend to the sky.  Once spring temperatures are warm enough, coffeetree's shy leaves are finally coaxed into emergance, usually sometime in mid to late May - they are worth the wait.  One of only a handful of trees with bi-pinnate leaves, coffeetree leaves are blue/green in color and immense - sometimes measuring 3' long.  Bi-pinnate refers to the way the leaves are arranged on their stems - click here for more on leaf arrangement and scroll down to "leaf types".  Although the size of the leaves is tremendous, the leaflets that comprise the leaf are small, delicate and lacy - an interesting contrast to the rest of the tree.  Coffeetree's fragrant flowers aren't very showy,  but the fruits sure are!  Enclosed in a large brown leathery pod, the seeds are round, hard, dark brown and roughly the size of a quarter.  It is for these seeds that the tree is named - early settlers ground and boiled them to make a coffee-like beverage.  A tree in full fruit is impressive, appearing to have singular small, flat brown bananas dangling from the branches.  These pods can be messy, so select a fruitless male tree for ease in landscape maintenance.

The background of the UNH Campus Tree Inventory web-site is a canopy photo of the tree pictured here, which is growing on the northeast side of Thompson Hall, next to the parking lot.  It is our only coffeetree of significant size.  Other smaller trees can be found growing on the north side of Babcock hall and northwest of Memorial Field in front of the Whittemore Center.

Kentucky coffeetree is native to the United States, from New York and Pennsylvania to Minnesota, Nebraska, Oklahoma and Tennessee.