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| Photo Credit: Lane Greer |
| Grow sweetbay magnolia for its creamy-white flowers and heavenly scent. |
There’s a great Bugs Bunny cartoon in which his antagonist, a highway construction worker, gets flattened by an elevator. As the construction worker steps out of the elevator shaft, he remarks, “I’m feeling mighty low.”
There may be some mighty low spots in your yard, too – places that tend to hold onto water after every rain. At my house, there’s an underground spring that runs just at the edge of my property, and I’m tired of getting the lawn mower stuck there every week during the summer. Isn’t there something better to use than grass?! | Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: Lane Greer | | One of the best qualities of sycamore is its bark, which peels off to reveal gray, white and reddish-brown hues. |
Actually, yes. There are several trees that grow very well in these low, wet spots:
Sweetbay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana; hardy in zones 5-9). A US native, sweetbay magnolia is a shrubby tree, evergreen in the Deep South but deciduous farther north. It grows quickly up to about 15 feet in the North, but reaches 50 feet in the South. The tree’s flowers are the same creamy-white as those of Southern magnolia (M. grandiflora) and have the same wonderful lemony fragrance, but sweetbay’s flowers are much smaller. Sweetbay will grow in full sun or part shade. Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis; hardy in zones 4-9). Our native sycamore is valued for its peeling bark, showing patches of gray, white and reddish-brown. Its leaves are very large – a perennial favorite among children – and the fruits are fuzzy, dull yellow globes that drop in autumn. (Most sycamores don’t produce a lot of fruit, so don’t worry about this being a messy tree.) The tree grows very tall – up to 75 feet if conditions are right.
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