Studies of trees in winter

by Annie Oakes Huntington

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The sugar maple is typically American, and is especially associated in our minds with the farming and country life of New England. It is found in all the Northeastern States growing wild and extensively cultivated. Maple sugar is made from the sap of this tree in the early spring. A clear, bright day and a westerly wind succeeding a frosty night are most favorable to the flow of sap, according to Emerson. A hole is bored in the trunk of the tree, and the sap flows for about three weeks. It is collected daily in buckets, and then boiled into syrup. A sugar maple should not be tapped before it is twenty-five or thirty years old, but after that age it may be tapped annually as long as it lives. The wood of this tree is hard and smooth, and is much used for furniture and the interior finishing of houses. Occasionally a tree is found where the fibres of the wood are contorted irregularly into round points called bird’s eyes. The cause of this peculiar bird’s-eye maple is unknown, and the theory that the grain is diverted by the tapping of woodpeckers for the sweet sap is an unsatisfactory explanation, for some trees are thickly covered, while others do not have a single spot.

The Latin name, Acer saccharum—sugar maple—came from the Arabic, Soukar.

Red or Swamp Maple Acer rubrum

A low tree, with a rounded head, smooth gray bark, reddish twigs dotted with brown, and small, round red buds with smooth scales. When old the bark cracks and peels off in long, slender flakes. Small leaf-scars opposite each other on the stem. The flowers come before the leaves, from the round flower buds clustered around the stem.

Even in the middle of winter the red maple is true to its distinctive characteristic of color, and one marvels to find so much red in its buds and twigs. The gray trunks are in fine contrast, and accentuate the color, and the curving tips of the branches, with their delicate twigs and graceful outlines, give the trees great beauty.

The red maple is one of the very first trees to bloom in the early spring, and then its color is conspicuous, for, as Lowell says, it “crimsons to a coral reef.” The flowers are sweet scented, and the carrying of pollen is done on a wholesale plan over the tree by little, inconspicuous insects, which carry the pollen dust from flower to flower.

RED MAPLE
Acer rubrum

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