Through our virtual programming series, Nature in your Neighborhood, we challenged volunteers to go out into their neighborhoods or backyards to see what plants sparked their interest. Whether plants are native or non native, we can all appreciate a connection to nature and the curiosity that it can spark!
By: Jessie Liang
Red Maple Trees are native to eastern deciduous forests. They can be found in Maine west to Minnesota, south to Texas, and east to Florida. In other words, they are not invasive. There are about 128 species of maple trees. The most common species are sugar maple and red maple. Although they are all maples, only sugar maple trees can use to make maple syrup. The reason is that other tree saps from maple trees are not sweet as the sugar maple. However, maple trees are still very important in our lives, people nowadays used them to make baseball bats, bowling pins, pool cue shafts, and hardwood flooring because Maple trees contained a type of hardwood that is hard to break.
Therefore, maple trees symbolized strength and endurance. Maple trees can grow up to 150 ft. (45 m) tall, but that usually happened in the forest. Most of the Maple trees won’t grow tall as the ones in the forest, like the picture I took at our front door.
How to Identify Different Types of Maple Trees? There are two ways that you can identify maple trees, first way is to observe their leaves, the second ways is to observe their bark. To observe their leaves, you can identify how many lobes they have in their leaves, they usually contained 3-5 lobes. You can identify the color of their leaves as well, the color range is from green all the way to red. To observe their bark, you can identify their pattern and the color of their bark. The color range of the bark is from gray-brown to reddish-brown. These are the two easiest ways to identify Maple Trees.