Sweetgum

Liquidambar styraciflua

Sweetgum grows throughout the Southeast, from Connecticut to central Florida and eastern Texas. It's also found scattered throughout Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In Hawaii, sweetgum is cultivated. Its native range includes southern Connecticut to southern Indiana, southern Illinois and southeastern Missouri to south Florida, southeastern Texas, and southeastern Oklahoma, as well as northeastern Mexico to Nicaragua. It generally requires high amounts of moisture and sun.

Fruit: A 1"-1.5" woody and spiny, long-stalked, ball-shaped head of capsules. Seeds are small and winged. Fruit usually appears on the tree in August-September and remains on the tree well into the winter.

Flowers: A small, red-tinged, bright yellow flower. Male flowers are arranged on a raceme, and female flowers hang at the end of the same stalk as the male flowers. They display from April to May.

Uses: The straight form makes sweetgum good for lumber, furniture, musical instrument components, and veneer. It is second in production only to oaks for hardwood. Sweetgum is also known as copalm balm, and the resinous gum is used in Mexico and Europe as a substitute for storax.

Ethnobotany: In pioneer days, the gum was obtained by peeling back the bark and scraping off the resin-like solid. This was used to create chewing gum and folk medicines (particularly for dysentery and diarrhea.) Comanches would use an unknown species as contraception. Assiniboins would use sweetgum to suppress menstrual flow. Various parts of the tree were used on wounds, including tea made from the leaves being used to wash wounds and balsam from the bark being used as an astringent.

Importance to wildlife: Sweetgum supports Imperial Moth and Hickory Horndevil larvae. During the winter, songbirds eat the seeds and small birds probe inside fruits for invertebrates. Beavers, mice, and rabbits eat the bark.

The full sweetgum tree. Sweetgum is a large deciduous tree that averages 60-80 feet tall but can reach 130 feet.

The young bark of a sweetgum. Notice the small corklike projections that are common in younger sweetgum bark. Mature bark is grayish brown and has irregular furrows

A branch on a sweetgum. The woody "wings" that come off the top of the branch are corky projections similar to those on the bark. Though not visible in this photo, short spur twigs are common.

The twig and terminal bud of a sweetgum. Sweetgum leaves are in a simple and alternate arrangement. The terminal buds are imbricate, 6-12 mm long, pointed, and glabrous other than bud scales fringed with hairs.

A single leaf on a sweetgum. Leaves are palmately 5-7 lobed, forming a star shape. They are 8-18 cm long and wide, evenly toothed, bright green and lustrous above, and paler and glabrous beneath except for hair tufts in the vein axils. When crushed, the leaves are fragrant. Leaves begin to change color to bright red, purple, yellow, or orange in the fall and early winter. Sewanee is in the USDA hardiness zone 6, so leaves will change in the fall here.

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