Sugar Maple

Sugar Maple

Acer saccharum

    Few trees -- if any -- are as loved as the classic sugar maple. The sugar maple was the first one that I found in my search for a dozen trees on the Adirondack Coast. A towering sugar maple sits behind my apartment, overshadowing our cars. The leaves were brown and blotchy, not in the traditional fall color change, but something that lead me to fear the tree was sick -- crowded between apartments, parking lots and nearly spliced by a wooden fence, it’s perhaps not the best place for a tree to thrive. The second I discovered was a little ways off a secondary trail at Point Au Roche State Park. This one was much younger, just 15 or so feet in height, with a relatively thin base. At 15 feet, it is likely in the range of nine to 10 years of age. The leaves were already changing into bright yellows and reds.

The sugar maple tree grows to a height of 70 to 90 feet and 40 to 50 feet wide in maturity.  It has a pretty wide canopy which can make it great for casting shade on the area beneath and the trees themselves, regardless of the season, are among the prettiest to dot the northeast.

The iconic three-pointed leaves illuminate autumn skies in the northeast. The deciduous leaves grow up to seven and a half inches long and near as wide with five palmate lobes. They start off as a rich green in the spring and slowly turn to a light yellow until the end of fall they’re a dark, blackish-red. Leaves of the same tree commonly transform colors at different times and rates, making sugar maples a colorful array of different colors.

    The tree’s sap is processed into one of North America’s favorite delicacies, maple syrup. Sap from the tree has been processed by Native Americans for generations and used as barter long before colonists began making it themselves. The collection, done across the northeast and Canada, is a huge and storied industry. Metal taps and buckets fill the woods, sometimes with collection tubes in between, collecting the slowly-dripping sap. From there the sap is boiled to remove water, making about 1 liter of syrup for every 40 liters of raw sap.

    When I was a kid, my older brothers and fathers would fill our property with the buckets to collect sap. There wasn’t many sugar maples on our property and the yield was never huge -- especially compared to some of the large-scale networks of some of our neighbors and professionals -- but few things beat fresh maple syrup on a plate of homemade chocolate chip pancakes.

Humans aren’t the only ones who get its food from the sugar maple tree. Its twigs, buds, seeds and leaves are browsed on by white-tailed deer, moose, squirrels and snowshoe hare. Plenty of species of birds feast on their seeds as well or nest in their branches.

    The trees use doesn’t stop there, as its bark was used to make tea, medicine and dye and its ashes used to make soap. As timber, sugar maples are a common resource in the sports world. Sugar maples make up most of the wood in bowling alleys and pins with their wavy grains. The NBA builds their basketball courts with sugar maple and is a popular choice for baseball bats, pool cues and gunstocks.

New York, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin all have adopted sugar maple as their state tree, making them the most common state tree in the country. On the Vermont state quarter, two leafless sugar maples and a woodsmen adorne the mint. The maple leaf adornes the flag of Canada -- just proving North Americans love for the sugar maple.

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