They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but this photo may require only about half as many.

It isn’t that the photo isn’t impressive: it is, and it tells a story simply and elegantly. Plant-lover and flora-finder Greg Palermo snapped the picture last week at Felix Neck. The unusual image is a close-up of the developing flower of a Beetlebung tree.

He has a great eye (and an even better camera)! The flowers of the Beetlebung tree are inconspicuous, so you might not even realize the blooms have emerged. Compared to oaks and pine, which are spewing pollen everywhere, the flowering of the Beetlebung might seem rather insignificant. Small, greenish-white blossoms appear as the leaves of the tree unfold, and their pollen is considered only a mild allergen. 

Beetlebungs are dioecious trees, which indicates that all of the flowers on a single tree are usually either male or female. This suggests that both a male and female tree is needed for cross-fertilization and the production of fruit. However, Beetlebungs don’t always follow this rule and can occasionally have both types of flowers on a single tree, which would then be known as polygamo-dioecious.

The tree can even be sexed when in flower. Look for sparse clusters of flowers on a female tree and dense heads of flowers on the male. And these flowers are important for more than just the tree itself.

Bees, and not just honeybees, use them as an important source of nectar to be turned into some very special (and well-known) honey.

“She’s as sweet as tupelo honey,” sang Van Morrison, and it must have been a very exceptional sweetheart that he was comparing to this tree’s nectar. Honey from the Beetlebung tree (also called the tupelo tree) is renowned for its taste, quality, and sweetness. 

Beetlebungs are known by many names. Actually, they are only called Beetlebung on this Island. In other places, folks call them sour gum, tupelo, black tupelo, black gum, and pepperidge tree. The Island nomenclature is derived this way: beetle comes from betle, a mallet, and bung is a cork, both of which were made with this tree’s hard and rot-resistant wood. My favorite name, though, is its scientific one, Nyssa sylvatica, which translates poetically to nymph of the woods.

The flowers, if pollinated, will eventually give way to a fruit, called a drupe, that will become ripe in early fall. These fruits, while edible to humans, are quite sour, so usually provide more food for wildlife than humans. Birds, including robins, cedar waxwings, woodpeckers, and many others enjoy them, sour or not. When ripe, they are deep blue in color. In any event, Greg’s picture captured something a little beyond words – an example of the almost-invisible small miracles all around us that make possible the larger lush landscapes in which we live.

Suzan Bellincampi is director of the Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, and author of Martha’s Vineyard: A Field Guide to Island Nature.