MARVELOUS MAPLES

      Red maple trees and sugar maples trees have many marvels, including in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.  In fall in Lancaster County, they issue the most abundant, strikingly beautiful and obvious displays of colored leaves in this county.  These maples grow wild in this county; red maples in moist soil bottomlands, and sugar maples in a bit more upland habitats.  Both species are commonly planted on lawns because of their beauties through each year.  And red maples have red fall foliage, while the leaves of sugar maples turn red-orange in autumn, making woods and lawns the more attractive in fall.  

     As daylight hours become shorter each succeeding day in autumn, and average temperatures become lower, deciduous trees, including maples, shut off water to their leaves, allowing them to die.  And as they die, their green chlorophyll fades away, which reveals the other, breathtaking, colors of leaves, including reds, orange and yellow, which is an overwhelming feast to our eyes in fall.  

     But soon dead deciduous leaves float to the ground, creating multi-colored carpets of dead leaves on the ground.  Those carpets harbor a community of invertebrates, mice, shrews, box turtles and other small creatures.  Meanwhile, the trees are bare and dormant through winter.

     But starting in February, when afternoons are warm and nights are cold, deciduous tree sap rises little by little, up the cells of the cambium layer, just under the bark of each tree.  The cells expand in the warmth and contract in the cold, pumping sap up the cambium, cell by cell.  And because sugar maples have about two percent sugar in their rising sap, they are tapped to collect their sugary sap to boil down to syrup and candy that have their own, unique flavor.  

     Native Americans in northeastern North America first discovered making maple sugar, probably by accident.  Perhaps a group of them camped where there was no water, but they knew if they injured tree bark, they could collect the dripping sap from the wounds to drink and cook in.  From that boiling, they discovered sugar maples had the sweetest sap, and took less boiling than other tree saps, to make pure maple syrup and sugar.    

     Early in April, red maple trees are beautifully covered with red flowers.  The canopies of many bottomland woods of red maples are wonderfully red with their red blossoms.  Spring peeper frogs peep in ponds under red maples, while while mallard ducks and Canada geese swim in those ponds.   

     Around mid-May red, winged seeds of red maples spin like helicopter blades far and wide across the landscape and down to the ground where some are eaten by rodents.  But some of the surviving seeds eventually sprout into new seedlings, many of them far from the parent trees.  

     Red maples and sugar maples both have attractive shapes and cast ample shade on lawns during summer, into autumn.  And their green foliage adds beauty to woods and lawns.  

     Some of the older red maple and sugar maple trees are riddled with holes, large and small.  Some of those cavities are created by woodpeckers creating nurseries to raise young.  Other hollows are caused by wind ripping limbs off trees, leaving bare patches of wood on trunks that decay.  Several kinds of creatures, including black rat snakes, deer mice, Carolina chickadees, raccoons, gray squirrels, barred owls, wood ducks and other species, live and raise young in those tree hollows.

     Red maples and sugar maples have many features that benefit people and wildlife.  And we people have the God-given talent of enjoying the beauties of these trees the year around.