The Urban Pantheist

But only sugar maples

I never get over the loveliness of a carpet of sugar maple leaves.

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It's that time of year, where even my denial of the fact of autumn must fall away like so many beautiful sugar maple leaves.


One of the supposed advantages of using honey locust for street trees is their tiny leaflets easily blow away, not accumulating on the sidewalk. Um. Sure is pretty though.


Another day, another group of wine caps. The "rough ring" that they are named for (rugosoannulata) has fallen off each of these mushrooms. Never rely on only one field marking for identification, they say.

Sugar maple leaves.

On Sunday we went to Elm Bank Reservation, in Wellesley Mass (Just outside of the rt. 95 loop that more or less defines the perimeter of Metro Boston). It's a collection of formerly privately held land that has been set aside to be used as open space. The Massachusetts Horticultural Society has buildings and greenhouses there, there are soccer fields and canoe landings, but a lot of it just looks like forest. Here Alexis stands among some impressive white pines.( Read more... )

Grandmother Maple is a huge sugar maple (shown here towering over the big white pines in the background) at my work. I like it when trees have names.

Photos by cottonmanifesto. The maple foliage in a playground in Coolidge Corner, Brookline, seems to be bursting into flame.

Urban species #292: Sugar maple Acer saccharum

Sugar maples are the glory of the northeastern deciduous forest. With autumnal colors of vivid orange, blood red, and flames of yellow they glow amidst the ochre ashes and birches, and deep greens of the pines. Unfortunately, they do not survive the rigors of city life very well. Traffic compresses the soil around their roots, depriving them of water, soot clogs the pores of their leaves, and opportunistic wood decay fungi move in to claim weakened limbs. Most of the sugar maples in walking distance from my house are showing visible signs of decline. But their popularity shows no signs of flagging, and they continue to be chosen for city parks and streets, beginning to die almost as soon as they are dropped into their root holes. Sugar maples are sensitive to heat, as well, and cities are warmer year-round than the surrounding countryside. The man-made increase in temperature may drive the range of sugar maples north, out of the United States. The sugar maple's leaf on the flag of Canada will gain new meaning.

Ironically, there are more sugar maples in North America today than there were before European colonization. When Europeans learned that these beautiful trees could be induced to bleed sweet syrup in wintertime (actually, its sap must be evaporated to about one fortieth of its original volume to become syrup), they planted thousands in the forests of New England. The majority of sugar maples alive today are the offspring of trees planted by humans. In parts of the city where the sugar maple has enough soil for its roots, they provide shade in summer, a welcome burst of color in autumn, and austere beauty in winter.



A young sugar maple photographed in September, in Olmsted Park, beginning to change.

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