Northern Pecans: Pecan buds push open and reveal catkins

City Park, protogynous

Yesterday, the sun broke through the clouds so I grabbed my camera to photograph emerging pecan buds. My goal was to concentrate on recording the growth stage and flowering habit of a dozen pecan cultivars that we haven't gained a lot of experience with at the Pecan Experiment Field. When you look over the photos published in this post, you can see that some cultivars have popped open earlier than others. In addition, you can now distinguish protandrous flowering cultivars (early pollen) from protogynous cultivars (late pollen). Protandrous cultivars have short thick catkins that emerge at the same time as new shoots. The catkins on protogynous cultivars emerge after leaf brust and are long and thin in appearance. I have captioned each photo in this post with the cultivar name and the flowering type for that cultivar. Remember, you can see an enlarged version of each photo by simply clicking on one of the images.