I recently took this photo of a tree in my neighborhood. Can anyone identify the most likely kind of tree it is? I just want to add a tag to the Flickr image.
Are those balls hanging off it spiky? It’s hard to tell with the snow. If so, it could be a sweet gum.
Are the fruit on it little spiky balls? If so, it’s probably a sweet gum tree.
Ugh, called away by a quick work email, and ninja’ed!
I’ll have to take a closer look. Meanwhile, I didn’t pay attention to this particular tree last fall, so I don’t know what color its leaves turned to. However, I do remember seeing other trees around here of the same general shape which did turn that color in the fall.
Apparently sweetgums aren’t native to Oregon so it’d have to be an import.
I’ve seen many in Oregon, so I’d guess it gets used for landscaping a lot. A friend got one that was supposed to not have those fruit, but it wound up producing them. I remember he complained to the nursery he got it from, but I don’t remember what happened. The spiky things are pretty distinctive. Like a ball made entirely of open bird beaks.
Liquidambar styraciflua
better known as liquidamber… yes used in gardens the world over.
And now…
Number 4…
The Sweetgum. The Sweetgum.
The snow’s all gone and I stopped by there again today. Are these the kind of seed pods you’re referring to?
I think I’ve seen trees like this down in SoCal, although they don’t grow as well, possibly due to the dry climate. I think of them as “asterisk trees”.
My mom refers to the seed pods as “Sputniks.”
Here is a picture of a close-up of sweet gum leaves including some still-green seed pods. Is this what OP’s tree looks like?
The leaves turn red or reddish before they fall. The pods become very stiff and spiky when they ripen.
I kinda think that sweet gum trees and liquid amber trees are two different, but very similar and closely related species. Maybe they are the same species. They are widely used ornamental trees.
The street that I grew up on in Los Angeles was lined with these trees. The pods make an obnoxious mess – there are so any of them all over the place, and they are stiff and spikey. As noted above, each spike looks like a baby birds beak begging Mama Bird for breakfast. We always called them “birds nests”.
Here is a close-up of the liquid amber or sweet gum seed pod, fully opened up. Is this what OP’s tree has?
Kick up the snow a little and look for dropped seed pods and dropped leaves. There are often a lot of dropped pods under a sweetgum tree. If you find any leaves, they should have a five-point star shape.