Sorry, I have no picture. I’ll try to describe it.
First: I live in Chicago. So it grows in a temperate-but-gets-cold-climate.
Second: It looks like two trees. Maybe something grafted onto something else?
The bottom half is in bloom right now. Pink blossoms, no leaves yet. The branches “weep”, pointing down to the ground. It looks to me (although I am no arborist!) much like a cherry or apple, except for the weeping thing. Googling “weeping cherry” or “weeping apple” gives me pictures that look a lot like the bottom half, but without the top half.
The top half does not weep. The branches aren’t even very horizontal - they point to the sky - and are straight, without much branching at all. It budded leaves first, and just today started opening up some white flowers.
The trunk is pretty smooth, straight for about three feet before splitting into two large branches.
It really does look like two trees, one on top of the other!
Wow, interesting. It took me two readings to get a mental picture of what you’re describing but I think I’ve got it.
Weeping cherry tops are often grafted onto the trunk of a different tree. I’m betting whatever the original tree trunk is, it’s sending out branches through the graft.
Ok, that was my uneducated guess as well. I couldn’t figure out why anyone would graft a fairly uninteresting straight branched tree on top of a decorative, weeping tree, but if the original tree was on the bottom, the weeping one grafted on top and the original grew up *through *the graft, that makes sense.
It *is *really weird looking. I’ll try to get a picture of it tomorrow.
IIRC, the two halves lost their leaves at different times, too, making me wonder if the tree was dying! I suspect the landlord may prune the top half off if I ask her to - it’s getting into telephone wire height, and she’s not going to want to deal with that mess.
