Distribution
The sugar maple is one of the most widely and generally distributed trees in Eastern North America. The northern limit of its range on the Atlantic coast is Southern Newfoundland. It extends through Canada and the Northern States southwards along the Alleghany Mountains to Northern Georgia and West Florida, and westward along the valleys of the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay, by the shores of Lake St. John and the northern borders of the Great Lakes to the Lake of the Woods, and in the United States to Minnesota, Nebraska, Eastern Kansas, and Eastern Texas. It is common in all these regions, growing especially on rich uplands mixed with ashes and hickories, white oak, wild cherry, black birch, yellow birch, and hemlock, and often in the north forming the principal part of extensive forests. The undergrowth in some of the forests near the northern border of the United States is often composed almost entirely of young sugar maples, which grow readily under the dense shade of other trees. The type is more prevalent in the north—var. Rugelii and var. nigra in the central States, while var. leucoderme and var. floridanum appear to be the only forms found in the south.
Much of the splendour of the northern forest in early autumn is due to the abundance of the sugar maple, which is then unsurpassed by any other tree in brilliancy of colouring, the foliage turning to shades of deep red, scarlet, orange, or clear yellow.
A figure of an unusually large tree, showing the habit which it assumes when in the open, is given in Garden and Forest, v. 380 (1892). It grows on the farm of Mr. L. Parker, forty-five miles east of Cleveland, Ohio, and measures 13½ feet in girth at 2 feet from the ground, with very large limbs spreading over an area 100 feet in diameter. It has been tapped annually without any apparent ill-effects, and yields each year three gallons of syrup. Another illustration in Garden and Forest, iii. 167 (1890), of a tree exposed on a stony hillside in New Hampshire is of a very different type, and shows the habit of an adult tree which has lost the narrow upright form of growth it usually has when young.[1]
Remarkable Trees
Though introduced at a very early period (the date is given by Loudon as 1735, on whose authority we know not), the sugar maple has rarely thriven in England, or, so far as we know, in Europe. The reasons for its failure to grow in this country are as mysterious as in the case of the white oak, the American beech, and other trees of the Eastern States; but it seems a short-lived tree, and seldom attains any considerable size. Loudon mentions several trees of no great age 20 to 40 feet high, and one at Purser's Cross which was 45 feet. But none of these, so far as we can learn, are now living, and some maples which have been reported under this name turn out to belong to other species. We know,
- ↑ The fastigiate tree, supposed to be of this species, is really A. rubrum. Cf. p. 672.
