Description
Slender Silhouette Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua ‘Slender Silhouette’): A Narrow Native Accent Tree
Slender Silhouette is a tightly columnar selection of American sweetgum. It gives you the star-shaped leaf and strong fall color of the species in a footprint of about 60 feet tall by 6 feet wide. Branches stay close to the trunk, so the tree stays nearly as narrow at the top as it is at the base.
The cultivar was found by Don Shadow in Tennessee. Summer foliage is glossy green and maple-like. In fall the leaves turn mixed yellow, orange, red, and burgundy. Bark becomes deeply furrowed with age.
It is not fruitless. It does produce the familiar spiky sweetgum balls, but usually far fewer than a seedling tree. If you need a wide, seedless canopy, use Cherokee. If you want rounded, seedless foliage on a broader tree, use Rotundiloba. Use Slender Silhouette when the job is vertical space: property lines, tight side yards, screens, and street strips where a 40-foot-wide sweetgum will not fit.








