For years, I assumed the red maple got its name from its autumn colour. It turns out a striking red fall display is something other maples can pull off, too, and not a distinguishing feature. It turns out I was giving credit to the wrong season!
Spring is where the red maple earns its name. And spring is the best time to actually learn your trees. Not summer, when everything is a uniform canopy of green…and not during the fall colours, either. Spring is when the maple trees reveal themselves one at a time.
We moved to our property in Muskoka not knowing much beyond "those are maples." We knew they gave us the most beautiful dense shade in summer, that they brought in birds and a variety of wildlife, and that come fall, they made their presence very well known in the most spectacular, and frankly exhausting, way possible. Soooo many leaves to rake!
Start With the Flowers
Red Maple: Bright red clusters of tiny flowers, early spring, before any leaves appear. The name finally makes sense! In summer, look for leaves with slightly serrated edges and shallow, V-shaped notches between the lobes. Fall colour ranges from orange to deep red, though ours have never once gone red. Just a beautiful golden hue.
Sugar Maple: Small yellow-green flowers, dangling in clusters. They appear a little later than the red maple's. Leaves have smooth edges and rounder, U-shaped notches. The classic fall showstopper: orange, gold, red.
Silver Maple: Flowers earliest of all, shifting from reddish buds to yellow-green clusters. The leaves are the giveaway, deeply cut and almost feathery, with a distinctly silvery-white underside. Fall colour is a paler yellow.
While we’re here - A word on tapping:
If you're interested in making your own maple syrup, you can tap all three of these trees. Sugar maple is the gold standard, with the sweetest sap, best yield. Red and silver maple both produce good syrup, but their seasons run shorter since they bud earlier in spring. For backyard tapping, any of the three will do the job. Now you know for next year. :)
A note on other maples you might see: black maple looks so similar to sugar maple that the two regularly hybridize. If you have one, you'd likely never know. Manitoba maple is easy to dismiss: unlike every other maple on this list, it has a compound leaf made up of several smaller leaflets, more like an ash tree than a typical maple. Once you know that, you won't confuse it with anything else. Norway maple is a different story. Native to Europe and widely planted as a street tree across Ontario, it's now considered invasive. It seeds aggressively and crowds out native species. (We don’t like this) If you're in town, there's a good chance you have one nearby. A quick trick to tell it from a sugar maple: snap the leaf stem and if it releases a milky white sap, it's a Norway.
We're still learning our trees. But we know them better now than we did…Which species flowers first, which one flickers silver in a breeze, which one is probably responsible for the majority of those bags. There's something nice about being able to call them by name.
These trees have been here longer than we have, and they'll likely be here long after us. The least we can do is know their names.
