Real Maple Syrup: Part Three

Eastern North American Maples: A Brief Guide To Sugary Goodness

I wanted to cover all the syrup trees in one post, but these fine trees deserve more attention and better pictures than what I can give them.  I've lived around these trees most of my life, and yet I always seem to focus on the pines, spruce, fir, etc.  For now then, a shorter look at the individual maples, starting with a whole post for the top tree:

Sugar Maple (Acer Saccharum)

This, without a doubt, is the best tree to draw sap from, by far.  The map included in the last post, in fact, is pretty much biased towards the best terroir for the noble Sugar Maple, to the expense of the other trees.  To be fair, this is a maple almost made to work with the cycles of frost and thaw.  Few others, if indeed truly any, trees germinate at only two degrees above freezing.  That's right, our little friends sprout when it is 34 degrees Fahrenheit, and not much warmer.  This is not to say that they are a true northern tree; while they can handle extreme lows, they do need some decent length of summer heat to truly make it.  They are a species that needs the sun, and also a species that needs the cold, like their frequent companions the Eastern White Pine (Pinus Strobus). 

The range of the noble Acer Saccharum.  Thanks again, USGS!

In pre-colonial times, many moister forested areas in the eastern-central part of North America would have featured a dense canopy of Sugar Maples towered over by White Pines the equal of some of the most amazing giant trees out west.  In the fall, one imagines how amazing the bright orange foliage would have been in contrast with the towering, swaying pines.  Many of the first colonial residents in virgin forest areas left awe-struck accounts.

Oh, did I mention they turn orange?  Sadly I have no pictures to really do it justice...

Taken at Maybury State Park.  Maybury has lots of excellent second-growth beech-maple forest, as well as some of the furthest southern Tamarack swamps.  These are northern extensions into what otherwise starts to turn hot and dry with oak savannas and tallgrass prairie. 

With the exception of the Sassafras (Sassafras Albidum), the other maples, and the sumacs, no tree comes close to sheer brilliance.  One imagines that the First Born and then the colonial arrivals took notice of such brilliance and figured something special must be in the Sugar Maple.  In Vermont, home of the supposed best syrup ever (I will never let it go, Green Mountain guns at my door or otherwise), the spectacular autumn show which makes Bostonians and New Yorkers jam up their expressways in search of colored leaves is pretty much made by mountains of orange trees pocked by smaller concentrations of red and yellow.  The Adirondacks and Opeongo Laurentians (Algonquin), on the other hand, also feature a lot more lakes, somewhat darker skies, and a higher inclusion of northern conifers.  Alright, alright, so Vermont looks nice too.  Anyway, even further south where you get more southerly elements as well as a lot more beech trees in the mix, the noble tree still manages to steal the show. 

Maybury State Park again.  That is the same second-growth beech-maple forest back there, while the front is a reclaimed field turned into a prairie restoration; the soil and tree cover in the immediate area points to a moisture level that would have made most of this still forest.  You can easily see in this picture how Sugar Maples tend to stand out as the dominant species.  I did not make it over to successfully identify the bright yellow foliage.

The First Born probably made the stuff, inspired by the orange leaves, well into Tennessee, as long as the odd winter kept things cold enough, long enough, and provided an appropriate thaw.  Obviously, such winters would not be common at lower elevations, and to this day commercial production of syrup from any tree ceases much farther south than the Great Lakes basin.  That said, the Cherokee, Shawnee, Iroquois, and colonials certainly made syrup along the northern forest extensions along the Appalachians.  Sugar Maple would be the primary choice for such an activity, considering as how most other reliable and tasty maple species such as Silver and Red (next post) tend to be lowland, river loving species.  That said, while the syrup would come from higher than where most people would dwell, and the southern Appalachians have the same problem that the ocean-proximate New England mountains have: maritime influence.  The Smokies, for instance, are temperate rainforests.

Not that Sugar Maple forests are too far off, in some ways, from that sort of lush dampness.  Where the beech trees that so often pair with them start to taper out (Fagus Grandifolia is a tree of vast range, equally at home among the north as it is in Florida and even Mexico), Sugar Maple becomes the dominant tree and starts making the place look really green,

A bit more southern than intended, still at Maybury.  Nevertheless, maples are far more dominant here than beech or most other trees.  The wee plants on the ground are seedlings, the majority of which will die off from lack of light in the next year or so. 

 ...with the exception of heavy leaf litter on the forest floor.  The canopy is thick enough to prevent most light from reaching the forest floor.

Not quite what I was trying to get at (a bit south of what I wanted), but the maples are pretty dominant here.  This was taken in Brighton Recreation Area, one of the most underrated and unmentioned places in Southeastern Michigan in which to get a good look at the native landscape.

In the farther north, the forest then almost looks like something from Ohio or Pennsylvania instead of Laurentian Canada.   

This is about three and a half miles north of Brent, Ontario.  In this moist, loamy environment, the dominating maples cut out competition from the slower growing northern conifers, and in the modern absence of wildfire, never get killed back now and then to let pines get a foothold.

In the future I can probably snap up a shot of what I'm talking about, but these two pictures come close.  The road shot is obviously crowded with underbrush from the extra light.  One can easily see how this species would be very attractive for making syrup, however, as in the ideal situations (see map in previous post), you get what is called a "sugar bush".  This is a naturally provided area with most of the trees being the syrup givers, relatively little underbrush to have to fight through, and the whole thing being remarkably convenient.  I could go on and on about this tree, and I might in the future, but one last item of concern draws us to a close here today: taste.

If you've never had maple syrup, get the hell off your computer and go try some.  If you have, think of the richest, most smooth maple taste you can imagine.  This is syrup and associated products from the Sugar Maple.  In other maples the flavor can sometimes overtake the other delicate features and even the sweetness; not so here.  Everything is perfectly balanced, all the more so if you can get the triple crown of glacially-deposited organic loam, Canadian Shield minerals, and that awesome northern water to make the maple sing with all the voices of heaven.  Needless to say, you don't want the bottle saying "made from x, x, and x in x, x, and x.  I may be biased, but just like in wine, the purity of singular source does not confuse the senses with complications to an already delightful complexity.  Oh, and one more thing that makes it even better?  Paper Birch (Betula Papyrifera) is usually close at hand in such northern places.  While I would never advocate stripping a birch, which usually scars and kills the poor thing, the First Born, especially the Ojibway and Algonquins, who use the entire tree, still have traditionalists who make cooking vessels out of birch bark (they heat the water with red hot stones).  Trust me when I say that the addition of that birch leeching into the syrup enhances it akin to an oak barrel kissing the grapes in wine.