Well bless my soul! Somebody was looking for this song on my blog tonight, and I traced it to here.

I played and recorded songs idiomatically when I did, various styles I'd learned as a working musician. In January 1990 I had a dream of a Kingston Trio style song by this name. Got up and wrote it down. I'm surprised people are still asking about it here in 2009.

A biology teacher tracked me down to tell me he had his students memorize it. I took it from a glossary. It describes a hermaphroditic human-form with dangling fruit, ghosting the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil from the Bible story. Not everybody got that. It gained a little popularity because people thought it was about marijuana.

Some corrections:

"And nature smiled back at us through our old Yum Yum Tree

A cladode chordate rutaceae with bifurcated leaves
Deciduous, yet somehow dioecious, strange to see
And these digitate integuments on indehiscent seeds
And these mucronates keep epiphytes from causing tubercles!

With these fancy words a botanist approved our Yum Yum Tree
While dissecting it with skill and care on PBS teevee!
Then he lectured on how nature's earth produced such goodies free,
then he sold some plans to squeeze it into high technologee.

Then industry improved yum-yum to better suit our will,
With phiso-meso DNA and hexachlorophyll,
And phiso-mega-death-a-hol and stuff they use for pills,
Then airplanes sprayed our neighborhood and all our pets fell ill!

Then Yum-Yum tankers sailed the seas and yum-yum juice got spilled,
Then lab'ratory tests on rats showed yum-yum juice could kill.
With some chagrin they rubbed their chins at this duplicity,
While nature smiled quietly inside that yum-yum tree.

One day a killer frost came and the yum-yum crop declined,
And yum-yum addicts ev'rywhere lost their collective mind.
The crime rate rose as prices soared, no yum-yum substitute,
So all right-thinking paranoids declared war on yum-yum fruit.

The CIA found communists behind this yum-yum slime.
Religions found the devil. The FBI found crime.
We had to move to rectify foul nature's wicked deeds.
Straight to jail for anybody caught possessing yum-yum seeds!

Then certain famous pressure groups did press the FCC
To have wiped clean from radio all songs of yum-yum trees.
The yum-yum tree did show mankind how silly it can be,
When it lays the blame for all its pain on something from a tree;

And I guess I'm now a criminal 'cause I found yum-yum seeds,
And I see nature smiling as I plant them quietly.

That was an ecological song.

No, it was about Man.

Copyright 1990 by yours truly.

My son salvaged a number of my old funny tunes for me. Write me at tomdark10@yahoo.com , tweet me at @tomdark9 , my blog's at tommydark.blogspot.com