Today's post will be talking about the sugar maple tree. The Latin name for this species is Acer saccharum. This tree is sometimes referred to as the sweet maple, curly maple, or rock maple.
While many Canadians immediate think of the red maple when they think of maple trees, this probably isn't the case if you're from Quebec. That's because the sugar maple is the main source of maple sap, which is distilled to make Canada's famous maple syrup! Of course, maple syrup can also be made from the sap of red maple and black maple trees, but sugar maple is unquestionably the best choice. Incidentally, if you've never heard of black maple, some people consider it to be a distinct species, and others consider it to be just a variety of sugar maple.
Within Canada, the range of the sugar maple is a very close overlap to the range of red maple. Here's a range map courtesy of Wikipedia:
If you're familiar with the range of red maple in the US, you'll immediately notice that sugar maple has a much smaller range. Sugar maple is not as tolerant of heat as red maple, so it's not found in southern ranges. This may be a problem someday. While red maple will probably continue to thrive in our climate as temperatures increase, sugar maple will have a harder time. Sugar maple needs cooler temperatures.
Sugar maples grow to be about the same size as (or just slightly larger than) red maples. A mature tree can often grow to thirty or even thirty-five meters in height (100-115 feet), and can be a meter (three feet) in diameter near the base of the tree. However, sugar maples generally live to be quite a bit older than red maples. It isn't uncommon for a sugar maple to live 200 years or more.
Sugar maples are quite fast growing, like red maples. A sugar maple can easily grow to five meters in height (15-18 feet) in less than a decade. However, unlike red maples, which start producing seed after just four or five years, the sugar maple doesn't start producing seeds for about thirty years!
The leaves of the sugar maple are unlike the red maple, because sugar maple leaves are not serrated. They do, however, have points on the ends of each lobe. Although the leaf on the Canadian flag is a generic stylized maple, it is very close to the shape of the sugar maple. Here's a photo:
Sugar maples are an important economic tree for many Canadians. Canada produces more than seventy percent of the world's maple syrup, and ninety percent of that comes from Quebec. If you've never spent a day working in a sugar shack, you're missing out!
The sugar maple's sugar content is usually rated around 2.0 or slightly higher. This means that the sap is 2.0% sugar. When the sap is boiled, most of the extra water needs to be boiled off, strengthening the concentration of sugar. If you start with about forty litres of sap before boiling it down, you're left with only about a litre remaining by the time the sugar is concentrated enough to be a good syrup. Since a single mature tree only produces anywhere from twenty to sixty litres of sap in a harvest year, you can often only produce roughly one full 1-litre jug of maple syrup from a mature tree.
Here are a few fun facts about sugar maples:
1. The oldest known sugar maple is a tree known as the "Comfort Tree." It's located in North Pelham (in Ontario's Niagara region) and it is estimated to be around 500 years old. This tree is a protected heritage tree.
2. When the leaves change colour in the fall, sometimes the leaves of the sugar maple will change past a bright red and turn a deep purple before they then turn brown.
3. Sugar maples produce huge numbers of seeds. It's a good thing that they do, since a lot of small animals seek these seeds as a preferred source of food. If you want to have rabbits and other small animals in your yard, plant some sugar maples! Just remember that it takes a long time before they'll bear seed.
At Replant.ca Environmental, we frequently include sugar maples in our species mixes, especially when planting in public parks and higher-visibility sites. They are a beautiful tree, and since they grow faster than many conifers, they're very visible within new forests during the months that they have leaves. Here's a photo of some of the sugar maple seedlings that we were planting on several of our projects this past fall:
Thanks for reading!
Replant.ca Environmental is a Canadian company that plants trees for carbon capture and builds community forests. We also plant trees in national, provincial, and municipal public parks to mitigate damage from wildfires, storms, insects, and forest diseases. We operate thanks to numerous small contributions from the general public, in addition to larger project sponsorships from businesses and corporations around the world. If you'd like to learn how to show your support, visit our donations page. Even if you aren't able to make a contribution, we very much appreciate when people are able to share our posts or our website link on social media, to help spread the word about the work that we're doing!
Teachers are welcome to use content from this post for their classes. If you know a teacher who might like to use this information, please share it with them! The more that people learn about trees, the better our world will be.
To learn more about the various species that we plant, visit the conifers page or the deciduous (hardwoods) page on our website. Thanks so much for your interest!
Incidentally, our organization is often seeking additional land for our carbon capture projects. Please visit this link if you might know of a recently-harvested property that we could rebuild into a permanent legacy forest.
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