A tree, usually not more than 30°—35° high, with small erect branches forming a narrow head and slender branchlets coated when they first appear with matted pale hairs, becoming glabrous and dark reddish brown in their second season.
Distribution. Deep swamps, eastern Louisiana to the valley of the Neches River (Beaumont, Jefferson County, and Concord, Hardin County), eastern Texas and northward through southern and eastern Arkansas to western Mississippi, western Tennessee and Kentucky, southeastern Missouri (Butler, Stoddard, Dunklin and Mississippi Counties), southern Illinois (Gallatin, Pulaski and Richland Counties), and southwestern Indiana (swamp eighteen miles west of Decker, Knox County, C. C. Deam). A form growing at Hattiesburg, Forrest County, Mississippi, at Glen Gordon, Covington, St. Tammany Parish, and Chopin, Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana, near Beaumont, Jefferson County, Texas, and at Poplar Bluff, Butler County, Missouri, with 3-lobed leaves rounded at base (f. rotundatum Sarg.) shows in the shape of the leaves a transition from the var. Drummondii to
Acer rubrum var. tridens Wood. Red Maple.
Acer carolinianum Britt., not Walt.
Leaves obovate, usually narrowed from above the middle to the rounded or rarely cuneate base, 3-lobed at apex, with acute or acuminate erect or slightly spreading lobes, simple or furnished with short lateral secondary lobes, remotely serrate except toward the base, with incurved glandular teeth, and often ovate by the suppression of the lateral lobes and acute or acuminate, thick and firm in texture, glaucous and usually pubescent or rarely tomentose or tomentulose below, 2′—3′ long and 1½′—2½′ wide; petioles slender, glabrous or pubescent. Flowers sometimes tawny yellow. Fruit usually much smaller and rarely also yellow.
Distribution. Usually with the species; Massachusetts and central New York, southward usually in the coast region and the middle districts to western Florida, along the Gulf coast to the valley of the Trinity River, Texas, and through western Louisiana, and Arkansas to northeastern Mississippi, southern Missouri, western Tennessee and Kentucky and southern Illinois; in North Carolina occasionally ascending on the Appalachian Mountains to altitudes of 3000°; often the prevailing Red Maple in southern Missouri and northwestern Louisiana; in the swamps of western Florida and southwestern Georgia the form with leaves densely tomentose below and pubescent petioles prevails.
13. [Acer Negundo] L. Box Elder. Ash-leaved Maple.
Leaves usually 3, rarely 5—7-foliolate, with a slender glabrous petiole 2′—3′ in length, the enlarged base often furnished with a minute rim of deciduous white hairs, and in falling leaving a large conspicuous scar surrounding the stem; leaflets ovate to elliptic or obovate, acuminate, and often long-pointed at apex, rounded or cuneate and often unsymmetrical at base, coarsely and irregularly serrate usually only above the middle or nearly entire, and occasionally slightly and irregularly lobulate; when they unfold more or less hoary-tomentose below and slightly pubescent above, and at maturity thin, light green, paler on the lower than on the upper surface, glabrous above, villose-pubescent along the under side of the midrib and veins, often furnished with conspicuous tufts of axillary hairs, otherwise glabrous or slightly pubescent below, 2½′—4′ long, and 1½′—2½′ wide, on slender glabrous petiolules, that of the terminal leaflet ¾′—1′ long and much longer than those of the smaller lateral leaflets. Flowers on slender glabrous or rarely hairy pedicels, minute, apetalous, yellow-green, the staminate and pistillate on separate trees, expanding just before or with the leaves from buds developed in the axils of the last leaves of the previous year, the staminate fascicled, the pistillate in narrow drooping racemes, sometimes furnished near the base with one or two smaller 3-lobed or rarely elliptic leaves; calyx 5-lobed, hairy, campanulate in the staminate flower, much smaller in the pistillate flower and divided to the base into 5 narrow sepals; corolla 0; stamens 4—6, with slender exserted hairy filaments and long linear anthers narrowed and apiculate at apex, 0 in the pistillate flower; ovary on a narrow rudimentary disk, pubescent, only partly inclosed by the calyx; style separating from the base into 2 long stigmatic lobes. Fruit attaining nearly its full size in summer, pendent on glabrous stems 1′—2′ long, in graceful racemes 6′—8′ in length, ripening in the autumn, deciduous from the stems persistent on the branches until the following spring, 1½′—2′ long, with narrow acute pubescent nutlets diverging at an acute angle and constricted below into a stipe-like base, and thin reticulate straight or falcate wings undulate toward the apex; seeds narrowed at the ends, smooth, bright red-brown, ½′ long.