Tree of the Week: California Sycamore

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Good morning. We always enjoy tree of the week a little bit more when it follows a week of bad news. (See: Dow drops 366 points, L.A. home sales hit 20-year low, etc.) So our tree-loving friend Pieter Severynen is especially welcome this week:

California Sycamore – Platanus racemosa

Our native Plane Tree evokes California’s wild nature, picturesque streams and open spaces. One of our most striking natives, its growth is unpredictable, with gracefully contorted and twisted branches or leaning trunk(s). Always graceful, the tree grows very fast to 30 to 80 feet tall, 20 to 50 feet wide and can build a massive trunk in the process. The old bark on the trunk sheds in pieces, revealing attractive smooth white skin below. The maple-like leaves are deeply lobed. The first crop of leaves is usually subject to anthracnose, a fungus disease that causes some of the leaves to curl up. While it looks disfiguring it is not fatal. Leaves turn a subtle yellowish brown in autumn before falling off. Three to seven seed balls hang from a single stalk (‘racemosa’ refers to a raceme, i.e. flowers opening along a central axis from the bottom up).

All sycamore genera are recognizable for the characteristic lobed leaf and the patchy bark. The London plane tree, P. x acerifolia, is a hybrid between the American (P. occidentalis) and the Eastern (P. orientalis) plane trees; it is a beloved street tree in many countries, and a common tree in Paris; it takes polluted air and pollarding, but lacks the grace of our California Sycamore. Some varieties are resistant to anthracnose and mildew. The oriental plane tree is featured in the ‘Ombre mai fu -– the sweet shade’ aria of Handel’s comic opera ‘Serse’, its tune later recycled in his Largo, wherein the Persian king Xerxes was so smitten with the beauty of a tree that he encountered on his way to teach the Greeks a lesson that he loaded the tree with golden ornaments and ordered a guard to keep watch forever.

Thanks, Pieter
Comments are always welcome. E-mail story tips to lalandblog@yahoo.com
E-mail Pieter: plseve@earthlink.net
Photo Credit: ucla.edu