On my travels walking around Pittsburgh, I noticed some brown pods laying in the street, and while I’ve seen these things before, I didn’t know what they were called or what they were from. A little research tells me that they’re “honey locust pods.” The honey locust tree (scientific name “gleditsia triacanthos”), is a deciduous tree – which means that it sheds or drops its leaves annually, and while I didn’t look around to see where these honey locust trees were in relation to where I was walking, the street was filled with the pods all over the place. Mature honey locust seed pods are generally dark brown, and often hooked or spirally twisted. Each seedpod contains several large seeds which are embedded in a thick pulp. The seedpods fall to the ground unopened during the late fall or winter – which is exactly when I was in Pittsburgh.
While I’ve isolated my own photo of one pod to showcase alongside a drawing from 1819 in the images above, you can see the grouping of honey locust pods that first caught my attention in the street in the Central Northeast neighborhood below left. Does that grouping catch your attention in any way? The way I saw it, it made me think of two eyes and a mouth. Is this case of pareidolia too abstract for you? Just for my own entertainment, I grabbed a couple more pods laying in the street to flesh out my concept, which you can see in the image below right. Now we’ve got a face looking back at us in the street, don’t you think?
Here’s another photo I took of a honey locust seedpod in the streets of Pittsburgh … as you can see, the seedpod stained the sidewalk, and in this case, the pod cracked open at some point and you can see the size and quality of 3 seeds that spilled out. Do you ever remember grabbing these things as a kid and shaking them? If my memory serves me correctly, they make a rattling noise if the pod is dried out enough and the seeds are still intact inside.
