Red Maple & Sugar Maple

Acer rubrum & Acer sacharum

Family Aceraceae

Uses

Syrup, sugar, water. The sap can serve as good drinking water in areas where water is contaminated. Boil sap slowly to produce syrup (it takes 30-40 gallons of sap to produce one gallon of syrup). Further boiling produces sugar.

Description

Growth form: Large tree.

Leaves: for red maples, 6-10cm (2.5-4in) long, opposite, usually with 3 (sometimes 5) pointed lobes, irregularly toothed, long petiole, hairy and whitish beneath. For sugar maples, 9-14cm (3.5-5.5in) long, opposite, usually with 5 palmate lobes, each with a few long teeth. Edges do not droop.

Flowers: tiny, hang in clusters, flowers in late winter and early spring. Reddish in red maple, yellow-green in sugar maple.

Fruits: paired keys, forking, brownish. Sugar maple keys are slightly longer, with roundish seed.

Buds: for red maple, reddish. For sugar maple, Pointed and brown.

Bark: for red maple, light gray and smooth becoming scaly. For sugar maple, grayish, with deep vertical ridges.

Habitat and Range

Red maple occurs in wet soils, especially along rivers and stream banks, swamps from Minnesota to Newfoundland and south to Florida and Texas.

Sugar maple occurs in forests and woodlands on mesic soils in valleys and uplands throughout Manitoba to Newfoundland, south to North Carolina and Kansas. Some disjunct populations in Texas, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina.

Season

Sap should be collected in early spring, when daytime temperatures are above freezing and nighttime temperatures are below.

Fun Facts

The red maple is also call “scarlet maple” and “swamp maple.” Sugar maple is also called “hard maple,” and “rock maple.”

All maples produce sap that can be used as outlined above, however sugar maples produce the best and the most sap, each tree potentially producing between 5 and 60 gallons each year.

Sugar maples are also important commercially as lumber.

The red maple has the greatest north-south range of all tree species on the east coast.