Recently in sycamore Category

Isn't that awesome looking? Check out a close-up.



That is just wacky. I swear they weren't peeling like this before we left for vacation in June. I knew that they did this - how else would they get that cool camouflage patterned bark?



That was a sycamore trunk that I spotted back in February. In March, I identified a baby sycamore down the street with beautiful silver gray bark with subtle variations in color. (It also had a town id tag around one of its branches.)



Now the baby sycamore looks like this.



There's really a contrast between the two colors of bark now. And lookie, it busted its tag! Did the peeling bark do that!? When I look up, I can actually see small patches of bark that have fallen off and were caught in the branches.

Why do these trees do this??? Is that how they grow? Like molting? Does it keep the bark and tree healthier? Is that "new" bark underneath? I don't get it.

So I looked it up! Turns out the sycamore's bark is too rigid to allow for the regular growth of the trunk, so as the trunk grows, the outer bark cracks and then falls off. So it is like molting. In little patches. Eew.

Lookie, my tree makes shade now! It's pretty good shade too. Even with those dead branches.

I've started looking at the shade from other trees now. Not that I'm comparing or anything. Wink. Wink. This is the shade from the next tree down the street, a honey locust.



I'm impressed with the shade I see under the honey locusts. Their long compound leaves are made up of leaflets that are quite small and they're more spread out than the leaves on my ash. The canopy just doesn't look as full and thick as that of an ash tree. And yet, the shade is pretty darn shady. This particular honey locust is bigger than my ash, but the shade is definitely comparable.

And then there's the next tree down the street, a little sycamore.

This is the cutest little tree. I was surprised by how sparse the leaves were when they finally arrived. Just individual little simple leaves on branches that don't seem to want to come together to close up the gaps. The canopy is much more open than even the honey locust. But even for so little a tree, there is still a nice amount of shade there. Certainly enough to provide some relief during a walk home on a hot summer day.