Platanus occidentalisL.

American sycamore

WFO wfo-0000487082 Accepted WFO 2026-06 8 photographs CC0 / CC BY

Plate 1 figs. a–h

Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Joseph Aubert
fig. a Joseph Aubert, CC BY 4.0 / 2022-06-11 / obs. 205694220
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Violet T.
fig. b Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 204988037
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. c Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199830598
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Lynn Harper
fig. d Lynn Harper, CC0 1.0 / obs. 199829540
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Violet T.
fig. e Violet T., CC BY 4.0 / obs. 202269240
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Bonnie Semmling
fig. f Bonnie Semmling, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 200177185
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Zakqary Roy
fig. g Zakqary Roy, CC BY 4.0 / obs. 199847439
Platanus occidentalis, photographed by Gus
fig. h Gus, CC BY-SA 4.0 / obs. 204477208

Every figure is a research-grade observation under CC0, CC BY or CC BY-SA, rehosted with the photographer’s name, the licence and the observation it came from. Photographs under a NonCommercial licence are excluded from this site and are never stored, which costs us a great many pictures and is not negotiable.

Flowering n = 48 observations

Peak flowering in Apr, from 48 community-annotated observations worldwide. This is a global aggregate, not a forecast for your garden: the same species flowers on different dates in different hemispheres, and citizen-science records cluster near cities, at weekends, and in spring. Where a species has fewer than 30 annotated records we do not draw this chart at all.

Also published as 12 synonyms

A synonym is not an error. It is a record of botanists disagreeing, in print, about where this plant belongs. Each of these was somebody’s considered answer.

  • Platanus densicoma Dode
  • Platanus excelsa Salisb.
  • Platanus integrifolia K.Koch
  • Platanus lobata Moench
  • Platanus occidentalis f. attenuata Sarg.
  • Platanus occidentalis f. occidentalis
  • Platanus occidentalis var. densicoma (Dode) Château & Chassignol
  • Platanus occidentalis var. occidentalis
  • Platanus orientalis var. occidentalis (L.) Kuntze
  • Platanus pyramidalis Dippel
  • Platanus vulgaris prol. occidentalis (L.) Cadevall
  • Platanus vulgaris var. angulosa Spach

Sourcesevery claim on this page

  1. World Flora Online Plant List. accepted name, authority, classification. CC0. Retrieved 2026-07-12.
  2. iNaturalist. photographs and flowering annotations, CC0 / CC BY / CC BY-SA only. per photograph. Retrieved 2026-06-27.

We publish what we can source and we say so when we cannot. This page has no care advice, no toxicity claim and no native range, because we do not yet have those from a source we can cite.