The Glorious Arizona Sycamore

During my earlier sojourns in Arizona, I was totally unaware of the beautiful sycamore trees native to the state. I may have heard of Sycamore Canyon, but that would have been mere words at the time. After all, I was college-age young and had more important matters on my mind, such as becoming a famous journalist and saving the world. Whatever.

Since moving to Prescott, I've lived next to sycamores and come to admire them. For their shade (above, in front of Lincoln School), for their sometimes immense size (along Oak Creek and Beaver Creek, for example), and for their color in all seasons. If any overseas readers are a tad confused at this point, the answer is that, yes, our sycamores are close cousins to the popular London plane tree, which is a hybrid of Asiatic and North American species. Except that ours grow wild.

Apparently Prescott is just a tad too altitudinous for the sycamore, which prospers with permanent water sources even at very low desert levels. I have read that, for all the emphasis on "cottonwood-willow associations" along the Salt River in Phoenix, the river banks were also once home to great stands of sycamore. The trees are found along the Verde and its tributaries; in fact, if you take a close look at the flora of Oak Creek, you'll discover that the most striking trees are the sycamore, not the oak for which it is named.

One of the notable features of the sycamore is the bark, which is nearly white in winter. The bark does darken in the spring and, as the trunk expands, it sloughs off bark, leaving lighter colored patches.

In the winter, our sycamores stand ghostly with their smooth white limbs. Unlike most trees, our planes spread their skin-like bark right over wounds from cut limbs (below).

In spring, the current year's crop of seed balls grow even as the trees leaf out.

In winter, the seed balls remain. If what I have read on the Internet is correct, the tree above with many pods attached to one another is likely a hybrid plane tree from the nursery.

Perhaps logically enough for a tree that inhabits steam sides, the sycamore spreads long shallow roots, creating a problem when it is used to shade sidewalks, as along Gurley at the Sharlot Hall grounds. The treelet below makes a valiant effort each year to emerge from the remains of a very large tree that was causing the sidewalk to buckle (look at the lower right of the picture). Probably at the advice of the lawyers, the tree was cut down. I say hurrah for the life force that keeps bringing the leaves back.

In the fall, our sycamores are among the showier of trees -- and furnish a fine, crunchy lot of leaves to kick through on a crisp autumn day.