Getting Acquainted with the Trees

by J. Horace McFarland

A mature sycamore maple

After all, it is the autumn time that brings this maple most strongly before us, for it flaunts its banners of scarlet and yellow in the woods, along the roads, with an insouciant swing of its own. The sugar possibility is forgotten, and it is a pure autumn pleasure to appreciate the richness of color, to be soon followed by the more sober cognizance of the elegance of outline and form disclosed when all the delicate tracery of twig and bough stands revealed against winter's frosty sky. The sugar maple has a curious habit of ripening or reddening some of its branches very early, as if it was hanging out a warning signal to the squirrels and the chipmunks to hurry along with their storing of nuts against the winter's need. I remember being puzzled one August morning as I drove along one of Delaware's flat, flat roads, to know what could possibly have produced the brilliant, blazing scarlet banner that hung across a distant wood as if a dozen red flags were being there displayed. Closer approach disclosed one rakish branch on a sugar maple, all afire with color, while every other leaf on the tree yet held the green of summer.

Again in the mountains, one late summer, half a lusty sugar maple set up a conflagration which, I was informed, presaged its early death. But the next summer it grew as freely as ever, and retained its sober green until the cool days and nights; just as if the ebullition of the season previous was but a breaking out of extra color life, rather than a suggestion of weakness or death.

Sycamore maple blossoms

The Norway maple is botanically Acer platanoides, really meaning plane-like maple, from the similarity of its leaves to those of the European plane. The sycamore maple is Acer Pseudo-platanus, which, being translated, means that old Linnæus thought it a sort of false plane-like maple. Both are European species, but both are far more familiar, as street and lawn trees, to us dwellers in cities than are many of our purely American species. There is a little difference in the bark of the two, and the leaves of the sycamore, while almost identical in form, are darker and thicker than those of the Norway, and they are whitish underneath, instead of light green. The habit of the two is twin-like; they can scarcely be distinguished when the leaves are off. But the flowers are totally different, and one would hardly believe them to be akin, judging only by appearances. The young leaves of the sycamore maple are lush and vigorous when the long, grape-like flower-clusters appear below the twigs. "Racemes" they are, botanically—and that is another truly good scientific word—while the beautiful Norway maple's flowers must stand the angular designation of "corymbs." But don't miss looking for the sycamore maple's long, pendulous racemes. They seem more grape-like than grape blossoms; and they stay long, apparently, the transition from flower to fruit being very gradual. I mind me of a sycamore I pass every winter day, with its dead fruit-clusters, a reminiscence of the flower-racemes, swinging in the frosty breeze, waiting until the spring push of the life within the twigs shoves them off.

To be ready to recognize this maple at the right time, it is well to observe and mark the difference between it and the Norway in the summer time, noting the leaves and the bark as suggested above.

Flowers of the ash-leaved maple

Another maple that is different is one variously known as box-elder, ash-leaved maple, or negundo. Of rapid growth, it makes a lusty, irregular tree. Its green-barked, withe-like limbs seem willing to grow in any direction—down, up, sidewise—and the result is a peculiar formlessness that has its own merit. I think of a fringe of box-elders along Paxton Creek, decked in early spring with true maple flowers on thread-like stems, each cluster surmounted by soft green foliage apparently borrowed from the ash, and it seems that no other tree could fit better into the place or the season. Then I remember another, a single stately tree that has had a great field all to itself, and stands up in superb dignity, dominating even the group of pin-oaks nearest to it. 'Twas the surprising mist of bloom on this tree that took me up the field on a run, one spring day, when the running was sweet in the air, but sticky underfoot. The color effect of the flowers is most delicate, and almost indescribable in ordinary chromatic terms. Don't miss the acquaintance of the ash-leaved maple at its flowering time, in the very flush of the springtime, my tree-loving friends!