Monday morning I pulled into the airport parking lot at about 6:45. The sun was not yet over the Blue Ridge to the east, but the horizon was lightening up quite a bit. Looking across the parking lot you could see silhouettes of the vegetation, as slim as it is around the edge of the parking lot. The airport owner sincerely believes that where airplanes live, trees should not. There are a few widely spaced red maples along the east perimeter, and a couple other odd trees in a lawn area between the buildings and the parking area. That’s it. It seems all other trees on the property must die! (As one would suspect I really am not pleased.)

Any way as I get out of my little pickup truck I glance towards the trees. The young 10 or 12-year-old red maples (Acer rubrum) stand stark against an expanse of grass on the hill rising behind them, their young limbs stretching upward towards the sky. At this age the open grown red maples resemble a short-stemmed tightly closed tulip in their nakedness.  What I notice next makes me smile a bit. the tips of the twigs appear swollen. The red maples are blooming!

At lunch I slip out for a closer inspection. Yes they are in bloom as red as red can be. This red bloom is one of the reasons this particular maple is called red maple with a generic name of rubrum. We often think of the redbud and dogwood as early spring bloomers. But it is this tree that is truly the early spring bloomer for much of eastern North America. The flowers aren’t big and showy but they have a certain charm when viewed up close. And if nothing else they are prolific, being packed the length of all year old branches. It is this prolificacy of red blooms that gives entire tree a red aura.

That does it.... on the way home that evening I seek out red maples along the road. Its not far before I see a row of mature reds along the edge of the road. They are ungainly trees in maturity, even open grown trees. Tall, yet uneven, erose crown shapes. Their summer foliage will veil some of this crude appearance, but now, as all winter they are a bit ugly. But yes they are sporting the tell tale red haze.

I detour along North River to view native stands of trees in erupting glory. From below I look up into the canopy of a grove of mature trees in the river bottom. Because of the distance up to the flowering wood, the impact is less than inspiring. Red maples can grow up to about 90 feet at maturity. These trees are mature, but more like 60 or 70 feet in height. In enclosed stands like this they have narrow crowns and it is a long ways up to the first branches. But I can see the bloom because I’m looking for it.

I leave the river bottom and drive up over the ridge towards home. Most of houses along this route are newer... 30 years old or less so large mature red maples aren’t abundant. The younger ones I see are well shaped and sport the red haze. I am driving through the uplands of the valley now, mostly open, with an ever increasing number of home sites encroaching on the pastoral scenery (another story). Up here there are few of the old natives. Glancing into the wooded draws and hollows back off the road as I drive along, I can see the red haze in scattered tree tops though.

As a boy growing up in South Jersey, I remember driving north on Route 130 with my Pop in late winter. Yes, late winter…usually the latter part of February in South Jersey. He would look out the car window in silence. Then suddenly he would ask “do you see the maples blooming”?  As an 8 or 9 year old, no I couldn’t say I noticed em.  Red maple is pretty prevalent in the lowlands of the western part of South Jersey, and when I happen to be up there now at bloom time, I have to wonder just how I coulda been so dense as a youth and missed them.... Pop must of thought I was pretty dense. They are prominent in the low wet areas and we used to call them swamp maples, as they’re called throughout much of their range. They grew in stands tall and ragged in appearance, not very graceful. To look up one of their twisted stems, you pretty much had to get your feet wet.

When I moved to the Valley as a forester I was a bit surprised to find them growing on all kinds of sites, including dry ridge tops. The red maple is a pretty versatile tree, and adaptable to a wide range of soil conditions. That, combined with their fast growth rate and brilliant autumn foliage makes them a favorite in the suburban landscape. Cultivars such as October Glory and Autumn Brilliance have been selected by the landscape trade for their outstanding fall coloration of brilliant reds and vibrant red/oranges. While having an attractive shape and form and dense crown in their youth, I fear these cultivars will mature like their less famous brethren .

They are very common here as an under story tree in the upland forests, growing in the shade of the oaks and white pines. They become well established in the shade, growing slowly, building energy reserves. Waiting, waiting, waiting ... for a hole to form in the canopy.... then they shoot for the sky to see which of the sun favored few can join the upper echelon in the canopy. This is the way of shade tolerant. During and after the heavy defoliation years of the gypsy moth in the Virginia mountains, the red maple had a hey day as vigorous juvenile trees were sitting in the understory and benefited from the mortality of the oaks and hickories over their heads. For some time to come, red maple will be a sizable component of our forest overstories.

Red Maples are known in the lumber trade as soft maples, i.e. maples with soft wood.  The classic hard maple is the venerable sugar maple(A. saccharum), a slow growing hardwooded close cousin.  As a result they are somewhat vulnerable to winter injuries and the resultant wood decays that follow.  Most forest specimens of any real size in our mountain stands are hollow, providing a useful purpose as den trees for birds and squirrels.  It’s a good thing, because their wood is of limited economic value, yielding weak and brittle lumber and firewood with only moderate heat values.

Red Maple Plate:

From "Hand Book Trees of New England" by Lorin Low Dame and Henry Brooks, The Athenæum Press, 1901, Copyright  expired, re-released in open E-book format by Project Gutenberg, January 2007. 

Soon the red blooms will pass, they will drop and be replaced by quickly developing winged seeds called samaras that will form in pairs to form “helicopters”. These winged seeds with a broad shaped crotch between them will also be tinged in red, as will leaf stems (petioles) on the lobed leaves. As the leaves emerge, they will have three to five lobes, arranged palmately, with reddish veins radiating from the petiole up the center of each lobe. The leaves will turn relatively early in the fall to brilliant reds, far outshining their diminutive bloom, but this time a harbinger of another season to come. It’s not hard to figure why this tree is called red maple!

Ahhh, but alas, the "red haze" is what I will remember.... as one of those events orchestrated by nature to tell me spring is on its way. I will look for it again next year and every year.

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