What the Heck is Red Bud?

Things that make Raleigh great!

Ever have a time when you came from a different part of the country and had to learn a few new things?

It's happened to me a few times in my life. The last time was when I moved to Raleigh without much idea of the local culture. I come from a large family that is a little on the laid back side. That means there isn't a lot of culture that any of us would know much about.

A short time after coming down here from the Maine coast, I joined a large multinational company with a small cadre of local folks who somehow slipped in.

One day they invited me to join them for lunch at a local establishment. Being polite, I set aside my home made sandwich and joined them.

One of them was a little on the wired side, and the first things out of his mouth when we went out to the parking lot was "you're going to see a lot of red bud." Being polite and not wanting to appear too stupid I just nodded my head.

I had no idea of what kind of beer Red Bud was. I didn't even know they brewed a red beer.

So I just piled in the car with four new friends and headed for the local place.

Local in the Triangle (Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill) is not like local in Maine. We drove way up into Durham almost into the city; about twenty five miles from where we were working.

The person who was so excited kept pointing out the windows and saying "Isn't it beautiful." I wasn't sure if he wasn't using something since he was so hyper.

We got to the establishment, which turned out to be an Italian restaurant. I thought it was kind of neat that an Italian Restaurant would offer interesting beers. I searched the whole beer menu for Red Bud. It wasn't there.

Then my new friends started ordering this and that with sweet tea. They didn't even order anything to drink. It turns out that we, me included, were not allowed to have a drink at lunch. Damned inconvenient on a hot spring day, I thought. But being polite and not wanting to appear as ignorant as I felt, I kept my mouth shut and ordered sweet tea.

If you've ever tasted the stuff they feed to hummingbirds you know what sweet tea tastes like. It is definitely not Red Bud.
On the way back our hyper buddy pointed in the direction of the trees and said isn't Red Bud pretty. That was when I realized that he was talking about a tree or bush. I wasn't sure which one but it wasn't a good cold beer.

It was more than a dozen years before I saw the first tree that I knew for sure was a red bud. It was a Texas Redbud and had a plaque to prove it. It didn't have any buds on it at all as I saw it for the first time in the winter.

I saw it a couple of weeks ago and it had red buds coming out all over it. It reminded me of when I had measles and was covered with little red spots. At a distance, the Texas Redbud looked like that.

It turns out that the Redbud family of trees is pretty large. The trees themselves are on the small size as trees go. They are tiny compared to maples and oaks.

Most of the Redbud trees that grow in the area around here are not red. They have a beautiful lavender color reminiscent of the lilac trees in New England.

Their branches look like wands covered in soft lavender as buds protrude from the wood all along the length of the branch. The lavender color blends nicely with the red, orange, white, pink and green of the first trees of spring here in the Triangle.

Redbuds started blooming near the end of February and should be blooming for some weeks to come before the green leaves dominate the trees.

If you plant a Redbud in your yard near the deck, you can spend many years with a real bud watching the darn thing grow.