#MAPLE TREE LEAF TYPE FREE#

Keys to differentiating the Sugar Maple from other maples include its leaves, bark, growth habit, and habitat. The bark of the Sugar Maple is smooth and gray when the tree is young, becoming irregularly furrowed, scaly, and dark gray on older trees. The buds are brown and sharp the buds are slender and pointed down. The twigs of the Sugar Maple are glossy and reddish brown. Trees of the Adirondacks: Sugar Maple bark is gray, smooth when the tree is young and scaly when the tree gets older. Sugar Maple on the Heart Lake Trail (28 June 2017). The winged seeds are green, turning reddish tan.

The fruit of Sugar Maple is a pair of winged seeds (called a samara Samara: A type of dry fruit where one seed is surrounded by papery tissue that helps carry the seed away from the tree as the wind blows. In the Adirondack Mountains, this tree usually flowers in mid-May with leaf expansion.

The Sugar Maple flowers in mid- to late-spring, producing tiny greenish yellow flowers with five sepals. Sugar Maple leaves turn red, yellow, or orange in autumn, contributing to the brilliant palette of colors seen in September and early October in the Adirondacks. The upper surface of a Sugar Maple leaf is green in the summer the lower surface is pale green to whitish. There is a moderately deep U-shaped notch ( sinus Sinus: In leaves with lobes, the indented area between two lobes.) between the lobes. Lobed leaves are leaves with distinct protrusions, either rounded or pointed. Each of the largest three lobes Lobe: A projection from an edge of a plant structure (such as a leaf), larger than a tooth. The leaves of the Sugar Maple usually have five squarish, shallow lobes. Like other maples, Sugar Maples have opposite Opposite Leaves: Leaves occurring in pairs at a node, with one leaf on either side of the stem., lobed leaves. Sugar Maple that grow in the open are oval in shape, with upswept lower branches and straight upper branches.

#MAPLE TREE LEAF TYPE FREE#

Forest-grown Sugar Maples are generally free from branches on the lower third to two-thirds of the tree, with a narrow, rounded crown. The branches are opposite, meaning that they emerge in pairs, opposite one another. The mature Sugar Maple is a large tree, growing 50-70 feet tall, with a straight, single trunk. Sugar Maple on the John Brown Farm Trails (23 September 2011). If you are in doubt, look at the bark of the tree to make a positive identification.Trees of the Adirondacks: Sugar Maple leaves turn red, yellow, or orange in the fall. In most cases, the leaves will be enough to help you determine what kind of maple you have.

If the leaf margin, or edge, of your maple's leaves appear serrated, it is probably a red maple.

Roughly toothed: The red maple has a slightly smaller leaf than most other species, with its most distinctive feature being a rough, saw-like edge.

Fuzzy: If your maple tree has a soft white coating on the underside of the leaf, it is almost certainly a silver maple.

A leaf from a Norway maple will yield a milky sap from the end of the leaf, while the sugar maple will not. The easiest way to tell these species apart using the leaves is to break a leaf off the twig.

Large, 5-lobed leaf: Both the sugar maple and the Norway maple have this characteristic, with the sugar maple leaf having a few large teeth and rounded spaces between the lobes.

There is some variation between cultivars of this tree, but most possess this feature to a greater or lesser degree. However, you will note all lobes of this leaf still originate from a single point on the leaf stock and have no stems of their own.

Very deeply-lobed leaves: The Japanese maple is known for very distinct lobing of the leaves, so much so that they almost appear to be compound leaves.

You will be able to easily distinguish between these two species by looking at the bark, detailed below.

Compound leaves: While the majority of maple species have simple leaves, two notable exceptions, the box elder and the paperbark maple, have compound leaves, with three to five leaflets per leaf stock.

Looking more closely at the details of the leaf will give you a better idea what sort of maple you have: Most maple species have simple, as opposed to compound, leaves with multiple lobes, the veins of which originate from a single, roughly central point on the leaf. You may already be familiar with the distinctive leaf shape associated with most members of the genus Acer.

Maple tree leaf type