The handsomest maple of them all

By ED KANZE

Sugar maples tend to get more credit for their fall colors than red maples, but to my eyes, reds deserve the greater acclaim.

Maybe part of the reason more of a fuss is made about sugar than reds is because sugars are less common and more fussy about where they grow. Sugar maples are on the whole mid-slope trees. You don’t find them on summits much, nor in wet ground at the bottoms of hills. They tend to flourish best in somewhat rocky, well-drained soils.

Red maples, by contrast, grow just about everywhere, from South Florida to northern Maine. We find them on ridges and mid-slopes but in greatest abundance in swamps. Along with the closely related silver maple (which tends to be a river floodplain specialist), red maples are sometimes called “swamp maples.” Typically, when I hear swamp maple applied to the tree I detect, or think I detect, derision, as if there’s something unseemly about growing in swamps. I love swamps. We all have good reason to, for the important roles they play as reservoirs of biodiversity and in storing groundwater and slowing its movement toward the sea.

Perhaps red maples also get the short end of the stick because their wood is less dense than the harder stuff produced by sugar maples. In some places, sugar maple is known as rock maple. If I’m hearing right, “rock” tends to be a term of approbation. This makes sense. Sugar maple wood fetches a higher price than the wood of so-called soft maples, the red and the silver. Sugar maple wood is fashioned into expensive furniture. Red maple is sawed up mainly for veneer and flooring and other prosaic usages. When loggers and foresters I know say “soft maple” they tend to sound disappointed. 

In how they reproduce, red maples and sugar maples tend to differ dramatically. Reds typically bear female and male flowers on separate trees. Female trees have stigmas, styles, and ovaries that, if all goes well in pollination, produce winged seeds. Male trees bear flowers bristling with pollen-shedding stamens. From my experience, it’s not unusual, however, to find bisexual red maples in high-stress habitats such as rocky ridges. Sugar maples, by contrast, are hermaphrodites. They produce female and male flowers on the same trees.

At a glance, the leaves of the red and sugar maple look about the same. Still, look again, and you’ll find stark differences. The notches between the lobes of red maple leaves are sharp-pointed, which is to say, shaped like the letter V. The notches (botanists call them sinuses) between the lobes of sugar maple leaves are rounded, or shaped like the letter U. Turn over a red maple leaf when it’s green, and the underside is pale, almost white. Turn over a sugar maple leaf, and you find it green. 

These differences aside, it’s in autumn that the red and sugar maple make their separate identities most obvious. Red maples turn color first. In late September or early October they glow a brilliant scarlet or deep ruby red, or both. In time, the red leaves may turn orange, although many go straight to yellow.

Sugar maple leaves tend to go straight from green to orange, although a few exceptional individuals may catch visual fire in a way to rival their red maple neighbors. When sugar maples are at peak color, a good many other kinds of trees may be looking their best, too. And so we tend to associate “peak color” with sugar maple timing. But I see things differently. There’s no peak I look forward to more every year than that of the red maple, whose leaves end their careers in a bonfire of blazing glory.