It’s turning into the year of the sugar maple, at least on our farm in the Connecticut River valley.
First came the unexpectedly excellent sugaring season, which had all the makings of a disaster until it started to snow again in April. The snow came down, the sap came up, and we made more syrup in the middle of April than we recently have in entire seasons.
But the real maple action began once the snow melted away. Suddenly there were tiny sugar maple seedlings everywhere. They’re now lined up thickly along the asparagus rows, tucked away among the raspberry trellises, and growing as thick as the grass in some parts of the sheep pasture. The seedlings are especially easy to spot (and hard to reach) in the day lilies along the driveway.
Just as with sugaring, there are many theories about why maple seedlings proliferate in some years and not in others. All of these make sense at first, such as an abundance of rainfall the previous autumn, a mild winter, and a relative lack of seed-eating rodents. But also as with sugaring, these theories falter in their predictive value, being much better at explaining what happened than what’s about to happen.
Sugar maples flower in April, hold the seeds on the tree over the summer, and let them go - helicoptering to the ground on the twin-seeded, winged contraptions called “samaras” - with the falling leaves. The seeds sit in the moist leaf litter under the snow and are among the first woodland seeds to germinate come springtime. The strategy seems to work well, as the seeds are protected from ground-dwelling rodents during the summer, hidden in the mass of leaves during the fall, and then hydrated under winter’s snows in order to get a fast start in spring.
Most trees produce a bumper crop of seeds - or nuts, in the case of beech and oak - some years and hardly any in other years. Sugar maple is no different. How exactly they pull this off - millions of trees working in unison across millions of acres - remains something of a mystery. Why they do it is clearer: they hope to produce so many individuals that a certain number of them will escape all the jaws that want to eat them.
That this year has been a bumper year for sugar maple seedlings is fine with me. We had some logging done on our property last summer, removing gnarled pasture pine in the hope of creating new space for a thicket of young trees that will provide food and cover for a range of songbirds, grouse, and other species that are currently less common in our otherwise-mature forest. These openings are now carpeted in 8-inch tall sugar maples. The seedlings are equally as thick and vigorous as the winter rye that I planted last fall on an adjacent pasture.
In fact, the maples are pretty thick in the rye, too, evidence of a fundamental yet often-overlooked fact about our surroundings here in New Hampshire and Vermont: this place wants to be a forest. Of course we know that intellectually - more than 80 percent of our states are blanketed in trees. Yet evolving as we did in the grassy savannahs of Africa, we humans continue to live our lives in the grassy savannahs we’ve created here in northern New England - the clearings around our houses, our roads, and our towns. It’s easy to forget that it’s woods, not fields, that dominate our landscape.
Our sheep seem to have internalized this reality. They diligently spent the latter part of May mowing down the maple seedlings at a steady clip, perhaps aware that their very lives depend on maintaining a beachhead of grass on our otherwise forested shores.
The sugar maple is an ecological canary in the coal mine here in New Hampshire and Vermont - an archetypal tree that has not been faring well in the fossil-fuel age. Sugar maples, because they require sweeter soils and more calcium than most other tree species, bear the brunt of acid rain; tailpipe emissions from close to home and power-plant emissions from farther upwind have combined to reduce the vigor of sugar maples, especially their ability to survive winter injury. The warming climate also seems poised to deliver a harsh blow to the species, if not across its range then at least here in northern New England, where sugar maple is already growing near the southern edge of its range.
So a farm overrun with tiny maple sugar seedlings feels like more than just an ecological fact to be noted this spring. It also feels like a glimmer of hope in uncertain times. To ascribe Mark Twain’s apocryphal quote to the world of sugar maples, “reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated.”