Black Gum (Nyssa sylvatica) has so many common names, you may well know it by a different one. And many of them aren’t obvious why they were chosen to describe the tree. But when you get down to the tree itself, it has a remarkable characteristic that makes its wood both unusable for normal lumber and incredibly useful for small items that need to withstand impact without splitting. Add its beautiful leaves and fall color and the tree’s ability to withstand a remarkable range of environmental conditions, and black gum is worth more than a look.
What we cover in this episode:
- How black gum contributed to Pepperidge Farm
- A remarkable variety of common names
- How cross grain makes the wood unsplittable
- What’s a meal gum?
- Black gum in the landscape
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Transcript:
Margaret had been up since dawn, mixing, kneading, letting dough rise. She had started baking to make sure her kids had nutritious food made with quality ingredients instead of, you know, the sometimes questionable mass-produced bread that was available at the time. This was different, though.
She wasn’t just baking for her family. She was going to try to sell her bread. This batch had to be good.
The bread wasn’t the first product Margaret started selling from her farm. Back in 1929, when times got hard, she and her family had to let go of the luxuries they used to enjoy—things like horses, cars, and servants. Margaret started selling apples and turkeys.
And now, in 1937, she was taking her farm business a step farther. Margaret took her bread to her local grocer, who agreed to stock it in his store. That was the beginning of a bakery brand we still know and love today.
But what does this have to do with a plant? Well, Margaret’s farm was named for a type of tree that grew there—the pepperidge tree, to be exact. Yep, it’s Pepperidge Farm. But what is a pepperidge tree? That’s another common name for a tree that I usually call black gum—Nyssa sylvatica.
You’re listening to Plant Connection. Life today can feel overwhelming, like we’ve drifted away from its natural rhythm. This podcast is your space to slow down, breathe, and rediscover the peace and clarity that come from reconnecting with the natural world.
I’m your host, Lisa Cutshaw. Let’s reconnect, one plant at a time.
So what tree is Nyssa sylvatica? It has a ton of common names, and where I’m from, black gum is probably the most common one.
Oddly, the tree doesn’t produce sap or gum, so I don’t know why it’s called a gum tree. And I couldn’t find any real explanation for why it would be called Pepperidge. The best guess I came across was that it was an old name for a barberry bush back in England, but why you would transfer that to this tree, I don’t know.
If you know, please reach out. I would love to learn more. My best guess for the Pepperidge thing is that the ridge part of the name may come from the tree’s tendency to grow near fresh water, but not in the water, really, slightly above the embankment.
So maybe we could call that part way up the ridge? It’s a stretch, I know. The common name with the most easily explainable source seems to be Tupelo. It comes from the Creek or Muscogee name for the tree, which is ito opilwa, which they’re the words for tree and swamp, which makes sense because they like to live near swampy areas.
But keep in mind, there are other trees with a common name that include the word Tupelo. So I guess my point here is common names can be quite tricky for this tree. Maybe the strangest common name is Beetlebung.
You heard that right, Beetlebung. That was a new one on me when I started researching this episode, and it seems that the name is mainly used on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. The story goes that the settlers had learned about whaling from the local Wampanoag people, and they had learned to use the wood of Nyssa Sylvatica to make two important items, the bung that acted as a stopper in the wooden barrels of whale oil, and the beetle, which was a wooden mallet used to drive that stopper into the barrel.
Since they used the wood of the tree to make both the beetle and the bung, they called it the Beetlebung. I don’t know, I guess there’s worse reasons to name a tree. And I have to admit, I have always had a soft spot for common names because they’re more personal than scientific names.
The scientific ones are helpful because it’s easier to know which tree they refer to. It is way common for the same common name to be used for multiple different trees, and in some cases, a common name can be so obscure that no one outside the area would know what tree you meant. I mean, Beetlebung might fall into that category.
But calling a tree Nyssa Sylvatica doesn’t tell you much about what people think or feel about the tree. Scientific names are clinical, not organic. And if you trace the common names a little further, you start to see how important the tree was to people in perhaps unexpected ways.
One characteristic of black gum is that it is not uncommon for the heartwood of an older tree to hollow out while the surrounding tree continues to live and grow. And inside that hollow trunk, people used to actually, you know, raise beehives, they would intentionally create beehives inside them. When hollow trees were cut down, the hollow parts of the trunk were cut into sections with a lid attached to make a container, which was then called a gum.
And if someone then used that container as a beehive, it was a bee gum. Now, this actually explained something for me from my childhood, how a little piece of furniture in my great grandma’s kitchen came to be called a meal gum. I never understood why we would call that cabinet a meal gum.
It sits against the wall, and it has a hinged top. And when you lift the top, you find an open space inside. And that was where my great grandma stored her flour and cornmeal.
Now, my grandma would also set her mixing bowl and measuring cup down in there so that it was easy to just put some flour or cornmeal in the bowl when she was ready to bake. It was always clear to me that the meal part of the name referred to cornmeal, but I didn’t know before now why that type of cabinet was called a gum. That meal gum was made by my great uncle Nice for his mom a long time ago.
I don’t know if he actually used black gum wood to make it. I’ll have to see if there’s a way to tell. Black gum wood is not commonly sold as lumber because it’s very hard to cut, and the trees often don’t grow straight enough to get a long straight length out of it.
Now, unusually, the wood is cross-grained, so it doesn’t just have grain going along the length of the trunk like most trees. It also has a grain going perpendicular across the wood, and that’s what makes the wood very difficult to split. When it was used to make things, it was often smaller items that you wouldn’t want to split, so, you know, something like a wooden mallet would make a lot of sense to use a type of wood that couldn’t split when you hit it on something.
Now, maybe because the trees were not sought out for lumber, there have been quite a few very old specimens found. In Ontario, one has been identified that dendrochronologists believe sprouted around 1435, almost 600 years ago, and one in Vermont is thought to be about 700 years old. Needless to say, black gum can live a very long time.
Now, among the Native Americans, a decoction of the bark has been used to treat things like respiratory diseases, diarrhea, and worms, but I couldn’t find much evidence that black gum is used in modern herbal compilations. I might keep looking into that, though, because it seems like the type of tree that would normally work into things like that, and I’m not sure why I say that. It’s just a feeling I have.
Black gum is one of those trees that need both male and female trees to be planted near each other to get berries to grow on the female trees, so if you would like to plant black gum in your garden, that is something to keep in mind if you’re looking for one that has berries. They do tend to be a slow-growing, medium-sized tree, so they can fit in many suburban-sized yards, maybe 30 to 40 feet tall and wide. The leaves are a shiny, lustrous green, making them a great choice for an ornamental shade tree.
I mean, it’s the kind of green that when you look at it, you might actually think this tree was going to be evergreen, but it’s not. It does lose its leaves in the fall, and that is actually one of the most striking characteristics of it. The leaves often turn a deep red in autumn, and though they are one of the earliest trees to start to show color, only a few leaves at a time turn, so the color can last a very long time.
There are several named varieties available commercially that offer fall color that range from orange to red to purple, and many of those named varieties are male-only selections, so if you do want a fruiting variety to offer food for wildlife, make sure to talk to your local nursery to find out which variety they carry that would work best. And even though they can survive very well in swampy conditions, they also thrive in medium to dry conditions, and once they’re established, they can tolerate drought. So these are very versatile trees.
The black gum is a beautiful tree that I would highly recommend. It’s actually one of my favorites to plant in conditions that are going to be tough for a tree to live in, but you want something really pretty and beautiful to provide shade. Black gum can take just about anything you throw at it.
And I don’t know, if you need a role model for your journaling or meditations, this would be a good one. It can handle almost anything life throws at it, and keeps its integrity. Stands straight and tall, even if it’s hollowed out inside.
We can all use a reminder once in a while to keep on standing and showing our beautiful colors even when life seems to hollow us out or send drought. Sometimes longevity is its own evidence of strength. One thing we do know is that black gum will keep on doing its thing on its own terms.
See you outside.
Thank you for joining me on this journey back to nature with Plant Connection.
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