Perhaps no other tree invokes sense of place like sugar maple.  Drive down any country lane in New Hampshire in early spring and you'll see many shiny metal buckets suspended from sugar maples, collecting sap.  Between 30 and 40 gallons is needed to yield one gallon of maple syrup.  The earliest written accounts of maple sugaring were made in the early 1600s by European explorers who observed American Indians gathering maple sap.

Sugar maple is unrivaled for fall color, producing the brilliant yellows, oranges, reds and crimsons that brings hordes of tourists to the New England area in October.  Other ornamental features are its lovely oval silhouette and the medium gray bark that breaks into deeply furrowed, irregularly blocky plates as it ages.

Sugar maple is native to North America from Eastern Canada to Texas.  It prefers a cool, deep, moist, well-drained soil and is somewhat shade tolerant.  It is an important food source for animals such as white-tailed deer, moose, porcupine, snowshoe hare, red squirrel, gray squirrel, and flying squirrels.  For additional information regarding the biological and ecological characteristics of sugar maple, click here.

1988 marked a year of serious decline for sugar maples in northern New England.  A small exotic insect from Europe - pear thrips, Taeniothrips inconsequens - had begun feeding inside the buds, completely defoliating five hundred thousand acres of Vermont's forests.  Scientists were intrigued at the expansion of this insect's diet from its usual association with fruit trees to sugar maple, leading some to think that the trees may have already been weakened by other stressors and were made vulnerable to pear thrips.  When trees are weakened by environmental stressors such as air pollition, soil compaction, drought and exposure to road salt, they are slower to mobilize their chemical arsenal and become more liable to attacks from pests.   Another recent exotic introduction, the Asian Longhorn Beetle, Anoplophora glabripennis is believed to be the next serious parasite of sugar maple, as well as other hardwood trees.  Click here to see more on Asian Longhorn Beetle.

The cluster of maples shown here is what makes the great lawn great.  For other sugar maple locations on campus, click here.