Nyssa was a water nymph in Greek myth, and Linnaeus handed the name to a genus of trees that stand, more often than not, in standing water. The Creek speakers of the same country had got there first and more plainly: ito, tree, and opilwa, swamp, run together into tupelo. Somewhere along the way somebody started calling them gums, which is simply wrong, since no tupelo produces gum or resin of any kind. The name most likely wandered over from the sweetgums sharing the same bottomland ground. Two and a half centuries later the wrong name is still the one on the tag.

Five species grow wild in eastern North America, and they sort themselves along a gradient of wetness. Nyssa sylvatica, the black gum or black tupelo, is the adaptable one, at home from a rocky upland to a swamp margin, and the longest-lived broadleaf tree in the East; a specimen in a hummocky swamp in southern New Hampshire has been dated past six hundred and seventy years. Nyssa biflora holds the wet flatwoods. Nyssa aquatica takes the river swamps proper, where the trunk swells into a buttressed base you can recognize from a canoe. And Nyssa ogeche, the Ogeechee tupelo, is the regional treasure, endemic to a narrow band of the Coastal Plain and the source of two good things at once: the sour red drupe Southern cooks turn into Ogeechee lime jelly, and the tupelo honey that will not granulate in the jar.

For a garden, the argument is the autumn. Black gum turns early and turns hard, running scarlet and orange into a deep wine-purple weeks before the rest of the woods has considered the season, an early flare that ecologists read as a signal to migrating birds that the small blue-black fruit is ripe. The rest of the year the tree keeps a straight central leader and tiers of short horizontal branches over a wide lateral root plate, which is what carries the whole structure through weather that flattens the trees around them.

Two honest cautions come with the beauty. Tupelos form a taproot early and resent being moved, which is why you so rarely see a large one offered at any price, and why the small container plant will overtake a bigger transplant inside a decade. Plant small, plant once. The fruit also drops, so site a tree over ground rather than over a patio. Give sun for the best color, acidic soil, and real attention to water through the first two summers, then leave the tree alone. Find more of the large kinds among our Canopy Trees, and the rest of the regional natives in our Southeastern Natives.