5 ms·
From the article's sidebar: > Once-treelined street losing its shade. The flaming red leaves of the liquidambar displayed fall colors before the rest of the st
by khrbrt 3y ago
From the article's sidebar:
> Once-treelined street losing its shade. The flaming red leaves of the liquidambar displayed fall colors before the rest of the street's once orderly progression because it went unwatered. The tree is now diseased and should be taken out. The upshot for the house and street it once shaded will be far higher summer heat and cooling bills
The Wikipedia entry for liquidambar:
> Liquidambar, commonly called sweetgum (star gum in the UK), gum,redgum, satin-walnut, or American storax, is the only genus in the flowering plant family Altingiaceae and has 15 species. They were formerly often treated in Hamamelidaceae. They are native to Southeast and east Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and eastern North America.
Well there's your problem. They planted trees which are totally off for the local environment.
Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't has a video where he shows that many of the trees planted after the LA earthquake are stunted and dying because they came from an eastern US plant catalog. The locally native trees and shrubs he planted himself are doing great. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtqKMxZ95s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vvtqKMxZ95s
- quercusa 3y agoI'm sure they'll replace it with something better suited... eucalyptus, maybe?
- beembeem 3y agoplease tell me this is a joke...
- memonkey 3y agoI hate the sweetgum tree. Those balls are the most annoying things ever. Pretty tree, but the Western Sycamore is better and native. Ideally there is a balance between native trees and plants that help cool the environment for one's lawn. One particularly amazing native California tree/shrub is the Manzanita which branches have an extremely cool-to-the-touch feel. They truly cool the air around it and the birds and small animals love it in the summer. Many California native plants have these amazing properties that promote a wonderfully diverse ecosystem.
- patrickthebold 3y agoI've always called those balls "gum balls" and only just now realized it's from a *gum tree and not just a silly name.
- tzs 3y ago> Well there's your problem. They planted trees which are totally off for the local environment. That's also why most squirrels you see in the Seattle area are eastern grey squirrels. A bit over a century go people decided that they wanted squirrels in the parks. You'd think the easy way to do that would be to send some people out to head to the nearest forest and capture some western grey squirrels and release them in the parks. But western grey squirrels only like to live in native trees and eat native plants, and parks are mostly non-native trees so that wouldn't work. The parks are mostly non-native because people like parks where the trees aren't too dense, aren't too tall, and have wide canopies. The native trees here are more toward the tall, dense, triangular canopy kind of tree. They had eastern grey squirrels shipped in from the other side of the country. The kinds of trees in the parks matched the trees where the eastern grey squirrels were native so the hope was they'd be happy in those parks. They were, and they were also happy to live and native trees and eat native plants, so were also happy to spread from the parks.