Red Maple

I did a quick tally on my archives at this site, as well as on NYPAOS and realize I have posted about a grand total of seven maple species: Acer griseum (paperbark maple), A. capillipes (snakebark maple), A. palmatum (Japanese maple) and A. pseudoplatanus (sycamore maple) here on Planted Cloud, and A. platanoides (Norway maple), A. saccharum (sugar maple) and A. campestre (hedge maple) on NYPAOS.

 

And yet, I've never mentioned Acer rubrum, or red maple (AKA: swamp maple), which is one of my favorite of the genus.  While the fall color is highly variable (despite the common name, the leaves on this species sometimes aren't red, but yellow and orange, too), I love this plant for its spring flowers.  The photo above was taken about two weeks ago.  It's of a 25 year old specimen at my folks' place.  As you can see, the new stems are red -- they turn this color in winter/fall -- and the buds are fattening up.

 

Here's the same tree, two weeks later.  The buds have flowered into tiny puffballs of marginally diminutive flowers of petals, stamens and pistils.  The tree is monecious, which means that there are female and male specimens of the tree.  Which is a wonderful segue way for me to implore you all to pick up a copy of Dirr. At first glance, his reference book is pretty dry.  But when you really read through all his descriptions you pick up wonderful passages like the following: 

I have assessed the peculiar sexual preferences of this species -- actually quite kinky for in a give population of seedlings staminate, pistillate, monoecious and monecious with hermaphrodite (bisexual) flowers occur; an interesting anecdote concerns male trees in a 25-tree popularion on the Georgia campus that grow much faster than their seed bearing sisters; my supposition...so much stored carbohydrate is required for fruit formation that vegetative growth is reduced.  

It's simply not often enough that one employs the term 'kinky' in reference to a tree!

Anyway, back to the tree.  In addition to being highly variable in fall color, red maples differ greatly in their cold tolerance, depending on where they were first grown as seedlings.  A seedling from the south may not perform well at all in northern climes and vice versa.  These are reasons that there's a tremendous market for red maple cultivars ('Armstrong,' 'Autumn Glory' and 'October Glory' are a few classics).  Indeed, if your client wants red fall color on a red maple guaranteed, you don't want to take your chances with generic nursery stock.