In every season, there is something red about red maple. Its beautiful flowers, most often red but occasionally yellow, are among the earliest glories of spring. Even the unfurling leaves are red as they first emerge from their buds. Year-round, you can count on red – or at least reddish – twigs. And in early October, the leaves make the rest of the year’s redness seem pale as they turn electrically bright shades of pink, purple, orange, yellow, and crimson before falling to the ground.
If this tree’s recent successes continue, there may be a lot more red across the landscape in the future. Red maple is described by one writer as having “great ecological amplitude.” It will grow on a great variety of soil types, whether wet or dry. It can colonize barren, sunlit sites and thrive in a shady forest understory. However versatile and opportunistic it is on its own, red maple also has humans to thank for its success over much of its range. Fire suppression, timber harvesting, and the work of insects and diseases that have been brought here from other continents have all given this tree a competitive advantage over other tree species.
Historically, red maple grew across most of the eastern United States and Canada, but was abundant only in swamps. Being thin-barked, it does not survive fire, and, except in swamps, forest fires, especially from lightning, used to be frequent – before people suppressed them. With large forest fires now rare in the East, those species most susceptible to it – sugar maple, beech, and yes, red maple – have thrived. The presence of these hardwoods, in turn, makes the forest less flammable overall.
Red maple now is safe from fire and has become common in uplands throughout the East, though it retains its swamp-dwelling method of reproducing: the seeds ripen, fall, and germinate right away, usually early in June. Typically, upland trees need not fear that their seeds will be washed away in spring floods, so sugar maple, birch, and beech seeds are scattered in summer and autumn and spend the winter on the ground. In uplands, red maple’s seedlings get a good head start. Plus, red maples produce good seed crops nearly every year, sometimes beginning when the trees are just four years old.
Logging practices have inadvertently helped red maple, because loggers leave it behind when harvesting other species. The stems are usually poorly formed and susceptible to decay, and the soft, almost white, somewhat boring-looking wood has not commanded much of a price in the past. If a red maple does happen to be cut, it sprouts vigorously from the stump.
To some extent, red maples took advantage of the empty spaces in the eastern forest when chestnut blight swept through. Dutch elm disease has almost eliminated American elm, another swamp-dweller, and red maple has appropriated that territory. Beech bark disease hasn’t eliminated beech, but it has killed many large trees, and this too has helped red maple.
Gypsy moths greatly prefer oak to red maple, and in areas that have been severely defoliated, red maple has again gained ground. Deer, too, would much rather eat oak than red maple, and where deer populations are high, oak seedlings hardly stand a chance. If another ominous threat, the hemlock woolly adelgid, continues its northward advance, there may be yet another opening for red maple.
It’s on the good, moist, rich sites that this tree is a rarity, for in these situations sugar maple is aggressive and usually victorious in northern New England. If, as many people fear, acid deposition degrades soils, sugar maple could be less able to hold its own in soils that are only moderately rich.
Add to this the deliberate – as opposed to inadvertent – attempts to propagate this species. Red maples, because they are adaptable, tough, and beautiful, have been planted across the continent in parks, yards, and along broad city streets, adding to the tree’s already large geographic range. Fifty-eight cultivars are listed in one manual of woody landscaping plants that I have, and the author, Michael Dirr, says that new introductions “seem to cascade like raindrops.” Indeed, red maple is a safer bet than sugar maple, which is fussy about soil. And it is stronger than silver maple, a very fast growing but weak-wooded tree, whose large branches are all too often found stretched out on the grass after a wind or ice storm.
For now, like a good Monopoly player, red maple seems to be on a roll, buying up properties in every neighborhood and in every price range and building on them quickly, before the dice are cast again. Monopolies in the forest are no better than those in human commerce, but antitrust legislation is not available in the woods. The future may be more rosy, but only in a very limited sense.