| Florida Champion
| Eastern Sycamore "The John Land Tree" Platanus occidentalis Apopka, Florida Circumference = 186 inches (15.5 feet)
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The American Sycamore, also called Eastern Sycamore or American Planetree, is one of the largest eastern hardwoods. In appearance, perhaps the most distinctive, with an enlarged base, massive, straight, mottled trunk, large, spreading, often crooked branches forming a broad, open crown, and with "button balls" swinging in the air. Its distinctive mottled bark flakes off in puzzle-like pieces, exposing yellowish and whitish underbark.
Identification
& CultureThis American Sycamore is a cultivated specimen growing south of its natural range. The tree was planted in 1900 by Florida pioneer settler R. D. Shepherd, and is growing in the lawn of the Apopka City Hall.
Colonial Champion
Washington Sycamores"The largest trees known in America were the Washington Sycamores on Three Brother Island.
"When he visited the Ohio Valley in 1771, George Washington was amazed at their size, and estimated in his diary that one of the group was 61 feet in circumference."page 20 of
West Virginia
A Guide to the Mountain State
©1941 Oxford University Press
sponsored by The Conservation Commission of West VirginiaThis fast-growing, long-lived, lowland tree prefers wet soils of stream banks, flood plains, lakeshores and swamp edges. A popular shade tree, Sycamore grows a larger diameter trunk than any other native eastern hardwood, reaching their greatest size in Ohio and Mississippi Valleys (see Washington Sycamores below), but unlike sequoias, redwoods and bristlecones of California, is old at 5-600 years.
Native Americans and French explorers used American Sycamore trunks for dugout canoes; one such craft was reported to be 65 feet long and weighed 9000 pounds. Hollow trunks of old giant trees were homes for chimney swifts in earlier times, and sheltered wood duck, opossum and raccoon.