Florida Sweetgum Traditional Cache

Florida Sweetgum

Sweetgum is familiar to me from a cache I have in NY.

GC6W360

There it is, as here, an ornamental, outside it’s natural range. If you want more than the abbreviated information you'll find here, please check out that cache page. You will find a link to that with the cache info for this cache at the bottom of this page. This is a P&G.and BYOP.

Sweetgum

Liquidambar styraciflua, commonly called American sweetgum, sweetgum, sweet gum, sweet-gum (sweet gum in the UK), hazel pine, American-storax, bilsted, red-gum, satin-walnut, star-leaved gum, or alligator-wood is a deciduous tree in the genus Liquidambar native to warm temperate areas of eastern North America and tropical montane regions of Mexico and Central America. Sweet gum is one of the main valuable forest trees in the southeastern United States, and is a popular ornamental tree in temperate climates.

The common name "sweet gum" refers to the species' "sweetish gum”, contrasting with the black gum (Nyssa sylvatica), only distantly related, with which the sweet gum overlaps broadly in range. The species is also known as the "red gum", for its reddish bark.

Distribution

Sweetgum is one of the most common hardwoods in the southeastern United States, where it occurs naturally at low to moderate altitudes from southwestern Connecticut south to central Florida, and west to Illinois, southern Missouri, and eastern Texas, but not colder areas of Appalchia or the Midwestern sates. The species also occurs in Mexico from southern Nuevo Leaon south to Chiapas, as well as in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras. In Mexico andCentral America, it is a characteristic plant of cloud forests, growing at middle elevations in various mountainous areas where the climate is humid and more temperate.

The US government distribution maps for this species are incorrect concerning the southern limit of distribution in Florida. This species occurs abundantly at Highlands Hammock State Park, Sebring, Highlands County, FL, and even southwest of Lake Okeechobee. (see the Univ. South Florida Atlas of Florida Plants).

The cache is a tied in, camoed, "micro" pill bottle, the kind you push hard to open and close. Please BYOP and put everything back as you found it. Please report if anything seems amiss, like no rubber band or broken plastic bag. Please, no tweezers, they kill the plastic.

GC6W360 is the NY cache. I tried to make a link, but give up. Please copy and paste the GC# to get to it!