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Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
issue #35 November 24, 2002

“In My Garden” this week is the glow of a native sugar maple in a churchyard near my home. Thinking about maple sugar led me to thinking about the other food plants available to the Pre-Columbian North Americans. What was it like, before fast, cheap global transportation, when we had only local produce?

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
November 9, 2003, issue 85

Can't do autumn without maples, so this issue honors our wonderful native red maples. Here's one along a Stamford, CT sidewalk, showing off its range of colors and its telltale hallmark: next year's bud clusters.

The reds are the most "common" of our 13 native maples. They range from southern Canada to Texas and Florida, and west to the Mississippi. They're the dominant overstory tree where conditions suit, and because of the red maple's flexibility, conditions suit it more often than any other native tree. Unlike the invasive Norways, the reds "play nicely with others", helping to sustain a diversified forest.

Eco-gardening is at its best in The Monday Garden
June 6, 2004, Issue 115

The silver maple (Acer saccharinum), along with the red maple and the sugar maple, is one of the Northeast’s three great native maples. Also called the soft maple, white maple, weirs maple or river maple, it’s found in moister sites throughout the cooler parts of Eastern North America and the Midwest.

picture: silver maple along Stamford’s Mill River

The silver maple is a relatively short-lived, soft-wooded, weak-branched fast grower that can reach 70 to 100 feet. Accordingly, it’s not the best tree for the yard where you’d like some a bit smaller and less likely to drop major branches on the roof. Likewise, it’s not the best street tree since it’s not particularly tolerant of de-icing salt, drought or urban pollution, not to mention the dropping branches.

However, in its proper environment, the silver maple is truly a “wonder tree”. Where it loves to be is along rivers and streams or open woods near water. There, even more than its cousin, the red maple, the silver maple is the supermarket and condo of the native riparian community.

The Monday Garden, October 10, 2004, Issue 133

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A Norway maple has three effective ways of destroying your lawn: dense summer shade, a smothering blanket of fall leaves, and a choking network of surface roots. There are mosses that will survive this onslaught, so treasure them. The prolific Norway seedlings also wreck havoc in the yard and surrounding garden.

No one doubts that Norway maples are beautiful: delicate lime-green flowers in spring, handsome leaves in summer, butter yellow, or sometimes red or orange in fall, graceful branches and trunks for the winter. The Norway maples hold their leaves longer in the fall than our native maples, providing late-season yellow accents for bare tree branches and winter evergreens. (FYI: Order of leaf turning: sugars, reds, Norway, silvers, then Japanese)

Picture: Here’s a leaf just fallen to the ground in the Hoyt Street Alley, Stamford, CT. Autumn 2003

Norway maples aren't so bad in Norway because it's too cold for them in most of the country but they have become one of the most widespread trees in Europe, as well as being a major pest in North America. Since the way we nurture our lawns in the USA tends to be worse for the environment than Norways are for our lawns (see Issue 60), Norways wouldn't be so bad except for their winged seeds (called “samaras”) that float off into our woodlands and wreck havoc there. What kills your lawn is also doing in our treasured woodland wildflowers.