Introduction: Truly a tree for all seasons, sourwood is one of our most beautiful natives and is ideal as a small specimen tree. It has lovely flowers that open in mid-summer, excellent fall color, and hanging racemes of fruit capsules in the winter. A native tree of North America, the sourwood is one of the few endemic trees that is not found in other continents unless planted and has no related species. This tree requires an acid soil and thus can be difficult to grow in northern Illinois. Why is sourwood used?
Where does sourwood tree grow? It is native to the acidic slopes of the Appalachian Mountains. As you might imagine, it grows beautifully in acidic soils with lower pH of 5. Fifteen tree type Heaths are native to North America. The family includes Elliotia (Georgia Plume), Rhododendrons, Kalmia (Mountain Laurels), Lyonia (Fetterbush), and Vaccinium (Blueberries). Trees typically grow up to about feet in height and feet in spread.
The trunk of a sourwood tree is straight and slender, the bark fissured and gray, and the crown narrow. Examples of sourwood in a Sentence Recent Examples on the Web Past the bee boxes in the field to the right, past a sourwood tree where the bees loved to get pollen, past the large solar array that provided most of the power on the Lan and through the door in those smoothly stuccoed walls.
