The wood of the sycamore is hard and coarse-grained and often has a flaky appearance, which led to its nickname of lacewood. It gets used in cabinets, furniture, boxes and barrels. The native Americans would use the whole trunk of a tree to make dugout canoes. The fruit of the sycamore is a woody ball that ripens in October and persists through the winter, when it breaks up into many small seeds. Each seed has a tuft of brown hairs that allows the wind to scatter it.
Sycamores have both male and female flowers, so every tree has fruits on it.
The name of the tree derives from the Greek sukomoros , which is a type of fig tree native to the Mediterranean. Evidently there is some similarity in the leaves, and this led to the transference of the name. It is similar in appearance to the sycamore, but has smaller leaves and its fruits appear in pairs rather than singly. The fungus attacks young twigs and leaves in the spring, causing them to die and fall off. Repeated attacks on a branch produce clusters of small twigs called witches brooms .