Snow Flakes of Cotton

Street Smart Naturalist · Jun 5, 2025 · 6m · transcript

Tis that time of year when cotton starts to snow the landscape. I always enjoy this annual falling of little white clusters out of the sky, particularly since we see so little real snow falling in Seattle. Neither cotton nor snow, the white “flakes” come from our local cottonwood, the black cottonwood, Populus trichocarpa. The specific epithet provides a hint to the plant’s legendary, or notorious for some, feature, as trichocarpa means “hairy seed,” from the Greek thrix, a hair, and karpos, fruit.

The female plants generate the snowstorms, from their seedpods, about the size of a pea and…