Dear Readers, I’ve mentioned before that the street trees here in East Finchley are becoming more and more exotic, but yesterday I was really stunned by the foliage on this Liquidamber or Sweetgum tree. The leaves vary from purple-brown through scarlet, gold and green, and it really is  the most magnificent little tree.

I think this is an American Sweetgum (Liquidamber styraciflua) – it’s found in the south-eastern United States, and it gets its name not from those golden leaves, but from its golden sap. Paul Wood (author of ‘London’s Street Trees) remarks that there has been a positive flurry of Sweetgum planting over the past decade. Sweetgums can reach a height of 45 metres (even the largest Plane trees only reach about 40 metres), and so these could be very impressive indeed, though presumably the one in the photo, close to the corner of Creighton Avenue, won’t be allowed to reach such giddy heights. The trees should be able to deal happily with our warming winters, and seem to be happy as street trees in their native USA, so fingers crossed that they’ll thrive.

Sweetgum in New Jersey (Photo By Famartin – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36997397)

To return to the sap: it can be chewed like chewing gum, but is also believed to have medicinal properties, particularly for treating sciatica, diarrhoea and ‘weakness of the nerves’. In Louisiana, a sharpened stick from the Sweetgum can be used to fend off a parlangua, a human/alligator hybrid, should you stumble across one. Should I meet such a creature while staggering home from a glass of wine too many at the local pub, I shall now know where to find a suitable weapon. However, the legend of the parlangua is thought to have originated because Louisiana mothers didn’t want their offspring wandering off into the swamps and drowning. Very sensible too.

Whilst superficially the Sweetgum might look like a maple, it’s actually most closely related to the Witch Hazels. The seed pods look like little medieval maces, and, where there is a large tree, they can be a bit of a problem  for pedestrians as they litter the pavement and present a trip hazard.

Photo By Dan Murtha – Flickr: IMG_3532, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12440516

However, the unripe seeds of the Sweetgum are a source of shikimic acid, which is a base ingredient for Tamiflu, a key treatment for influenza – normally the acid is sourced from the Star Anise tree, but a shortage encouraged scientists to look elsewhere. Cherokee people have long used Sweetgum as a herbal treatment for flu, and it seems they may have been onto something, as is so often the case.

And here’s a poem, by Ada Limón. Here’s what she says about it:

“There is so much to worry about. All the time, so much worry. Here, I wanted to take all the worry as far out as I could and then stamp it out under the heavy black boot of love.”
—Ada Limón

See what you think.

The Conditional

Ada Limón
1976 –

Say tomorrow doesn’t come.
Say the moon becomes an icy pit.
Say the sweet-gum tree is petrified.
Say the sun’s a foul black tire fire.
Say the owl’s eyes are pinpricks.
Say the raccoon’s a hot tar stain.
Say the shirt’s plastic ditch-litter.
Say the kitchen’s a cow’s corpse.
Say we never get to see it: bright
future, stuck like a bum star, never
coming close, never dazzling.
Say we never meet her. Never him.
Say we spend our last moments staring
at each other, hands knotted together,
clutching the dog, watching the sky burn.
Say, It doesn’t matter. Say, That would be
enough. Say you’d still want this: us alive,
right here, feeling lucky.