3. Sycamore

Dutch Elm Disease killed the street trees in St. Louis. All the American Elms that lined our streets, and so many other cities' streets, were dead.

St. Louis responded by planting sycamores. The big bark-shedding white trees with leaves as big as two of your hands and the little "sycamore balls" as we called them growing up, with the puffy little seeds that floated off on the wind.

Sycamores grow fast and die badly. They shed limbs--onto your car. They are the tallest trees on the block, and then they get struck by lightning. The one that used to be behind us terrified me. I just hoped it would hit Steve's garage instead of my house. But when the developer took it down in favor of a 4 car garage for her "condo" building (4 tiny apartments, still for sale 2 years later), it changed all the shade and sun patterns in my yard.

Now, when the sycamores die, which they do, being over 30 years old on average, the city knows better than to plant all of the same tree. My street has more than just sycamores--American basswoods, some black oaks. Sweetgums, annoying ornamental fruit trees, and the cursed silver maples.

But I still like the look, however fate-tempting it may be, of a street lined with the same tree every twenty feet or so. It unifies things (although, in the case of south city, most of the houses look the same, too). I would never plant one on purpose, mind you (see two paragraphs above), but I like that they're here.