Sycamore Tree

 When we were young we were familiar with the stories of a vertically challenged  and tax collector, Zaccheus who climbed up a sycamore to see Jesus who was passing by his hometown of Jericho.

And we loved this song in Sunday School.

Zacchaeus was a wee little man, and a wee little man was he.
He climbed up in a sycamore tree, for the Lord he wanted to see.
And as the Savior passed him by, He looked up in the tree,
And he said, "Zacchaeus, you come down;
For I'm going to your house today."

Zaccheus' Sycamore tree in Jericho.

Long ago recognized by the characters of its flowers and fruit, not to mention the arrangement and veining of its leaves, as a Maple, and correctly named accordingly the Great Maple, the remarkable denseness of its foliage, and the grateful shade which it in consequence affords, caused it to be confused in Western Europe, at an early period, with the true Sycamore, or Fig Mulberry (Ficus Sycamorus) of scripture, a confusion which it is stated is still retained in the language of flowers, according to which mystic code of symbolism this tree signifies "curiosity," because it is identified with that on which Zaccheus climbed that he might see Christ at His triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

 This confusion is said to have led to a considerable planting of this species by religious persons in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Similarly in Scotland it is still commonly known as the Plane, a confusion commemorated by Linnaeus in the specific name pseudo-platanus, and in the French "fausse Platane." The only resemblance, however, between the Sycamore and the Plane lies, as we have seen when considering the latter species, in the form of the leaves, which, between certain other species of the Maple group and some varieties of the Plane, does indeed amount almost to an identity of outline and of venation. The leaves of the Plane, however, are not in opposite pairs; their lobes are commonly more pointed than those of the Sycamore, and their surface is more glossy, and of a brighter, more yellow shade of green; whilst the globular monoecious catkins and bur-like fruit-clusters of the former are altogether unlike the racemes of greenish flowers, followed by bunches of winged fruits, or "keys," in the tree which we are now considering.