It. Here we have another plant that is native to East Tennessee. Glad that you're here to learn about sweet gum, liquid amber styracaflua. Now, this is a tree that we maybe more commonly run into in the woods compared to the residential landscape.
And that's because of the fruit of this tree, which is in my hand. And it is a little bit of a spiky ball. Some people call them gumballs that come off the sweet gum, but they're a little bit spiky, and they're not really nice to walk on if it's in a home landscape.
They also have quite a few surface roots, which makes them hard to grow grass under. They're quite distinctive in leaf, a very kind of distinct star shaped leaf on sweet gum that makes it quite recognizable, with tufts of hair on the backside of the pedial, which is a good way to identify this plant.
This can get quite large. You might see this over 60 foot tall in a lot of cases. The real star of really the thing that you really grow this tree for is its fall color, known as one of our best native trees for fall color.
And the fall color is quite variable, a mosaic of color, purples, oranges, yellows, reds, all sorts of different things. And it can be a little bit different from year to year, and different trees can be quite different.
And so this is a plant that's planted all over the University of Tennessee campus. And we see it in different places. And in the fall, it really comes and it shows out. Now, there are several cultivars that are available.
One in particular called Rotunda Loba, that does not have fruit, which you can look out for, that is quite adaptable, in particular to urban condition issues. And so sweet gum a great plant, but maybe you have to be a little bit careful when choosing cultivars.
So again, liquid ambars styracaflua or sweet gum. This plant does get up 90 foot tall, can spread out 40 to 60 foot wide, party from zones five through nine. And here's a landscape tip. Tremendous variation in fall color cultivars such as Rotundaloba.
Now, Rotunda Loba is spelled R-O-T-U-N-D-A-L-O-B-A cultivars such as Rotundaloba have great potential.
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