Do you know your box elder from your silver maple?
You’re walking through the park and see a large, show-stopping tree you’d love to plant in your own backyard. Or perhaps you’re moving into a new home, and you want to know what a maple tree looks like to ensure it isn’t the invasive Norway maple species. There are many reasons you may be looking to identify a maple tree. Before you head to the nursery or start tapping the trees in your yard, find out how to identify maple trees using different tree characteristics.
Maple trees, as they are commonly called, are part of the Acer genus and Sapindaceae family. You might have fond memories of cooling off under the shade of the maple tree in your family’s front yard as a kid, or maybe you always climbed the maple trees at your local park growing up. The trees earned the name Acer, meaning sharp, for their pointed leaves.
While there are over 100 maple tree varieties around the world, most of the species are native to Asia, although some varieties are native to Northern Africa, Europe, and North America.
Maple trees of all varieties are popular for providing shade and beautifying landscapes. For those lucky enough to have sugar or red maple trees in their yard, these species can even provide sweet sap that you can make into delicious maple syrup.
A maple tree’s bark looks slightly different depending on its age. Younger trees are light gray with smooth bark, while older trees are darker gray and rough to the touch. However, it’s easier to spot a maple tree by focusing on its leaves and not its bark. A maple leaf will often have five points and will turn bright red, orange, or yellow in the fall. It also has reddish twigs with small blooms on them.
With so many types of maple trees native to different parts of the world, it can be tricky to know the difference between the various maple tree species. Many maples share some characteristics, like leaves with five sharp points, while you can differentiate others based on the bark or fruits. Here are some common features to look closely for to identify maple trees and even determine the species in front of you.
Maple tree leaves have a distinct look. Many maple trees have five distinct points, or lobes, although maples have around three to nine lobes per leaf, depending on the species. One common and popular characteristic of maple trees is that they turn vibrant shades of red, orange, and yellow in the fall.
Lobes: Look for three to nine lobes on the leaf.
Color: Maple leaves turn vibrant, warm tones in the fall. Some trees, like red maples, tend to take on primarily a red tone in the leaves, while other types, like sugar maples, can have orange, yellow, and red leaves all at one time.
Sinuses: Maple leaves may have U- or V-shaped valleys between the pointed lobes. For example, sugar leafs have U-shaped sinuses, while silver maple leaves have V-shaped sinuses.
Leaflets: Most maple trees have a single leaf per leafstalk, but keep an eye out for paperback and boxelder maples, which have three to five leaflets coming from a single stem.
Serrations: Several maple tree varieties, such as red maples and Japanese maples, have serrations between the leaf lobes.
Veins: Maple tree leaves have prominent veins throughout the leaf to a central point near the stem.
Texture: Many maple tree varieties, including silver, black, and bigtooth maple trees, have fuzzy undersides of the leaves.
Leafstalks: For most maple trees, the leaf stalks or stems are nearly as long as or the same length as the leaf itself.
Most maple tree species are deciduous, so the leaves will fall in autumn and winter. When this happens, you can still identify maple trees based on their bark. Young maple trees tend to have smooth, gray-toned bark. As it matures, the maple tree develops dark brown to brownish-gray bark with wide sections of bark and deep, vertical fissures.
Some varieties stand out from other maple trees with mature gray bark, including silver, sugar, and Norway maples. Most maple trees feature bark that may curl, peel, or flake away over time.
If you look closely in the springtime, you may notice tiny blooms on maple trees. These trees have very subtle flowers growing in clusters that are red, brown, or green hues, making them easy to mistake for leaves or knobs on the branches. Red maple trees are known for their tiny clusters of red flowers in the spring.
The fruits of maple trees are easier to spot, and you probably have fond memories of playing with these so-called whirlybirds as a child. The fruits, called samaras, resemble two small wings, each connected to a seed. The natural, aerodynamic shape is ideal for floating along in the wind.
While there are many types of maple trees out there, you’re most likely to come across a select few on your neighborhood walks or park visits. Here’s how to identify maple trees by type, from the uniquely silvery, fuzzy leaves of a silver maple tree to the tiny clusters of red flowers on a red maple tree.
Unsurprisingly, red maple (Acer rubrum) trees are known for their bright red leaves come autumn. In warmer months, the leaves are dark green, and leaves are about 2.5 to 4 inches wide with three or five pointed lobes.
Aside from leaves, red maples also produce clusters of red flowers in the spring, and the samaras take on a reddish hue and grow in clusters like the flowers. This type of maple grows to about 60 to 90 feet tall, and the bark is known for having a grayish hue that grows darker as the tree ages.
The symbol on the Canadian flag, the sugar maple (Acer saccharum) is one of the most common maple trees in North America and is a key source of maple syrup. These trees are usually about 60 to 75 feet tall with dark brown to gray-toned bark that has furrowed ridges.
You can typically identify this type of maple tree by its leaves, which have five lobes with wide bases. In summer, leaves are a dark yellowish green on top and a lighter yellow-green underneath, while in the fall, the leaves color at different times. That means a single tree may sport all of the warm tones, from red to orange to yellow, at once.
The silver maple, or Acer saccharinum, is known for its fast-growing nature with roots that grow close to the surface of the ground. If you’re planning to plant a silver maple, make sure to keep it at least 10 feet away from walkways, driveways, or the house to prevent the roots from causing any damage. The tree bark is gray-toned and becomes flakey as the tree gets older.
Silver maples grow about 50 to 80 feet tall with five-lobed leaves and V-shaped sinuses. The key to identifying a silver maple tree? The leaves, particularly the underside, take on a silvery hue and may even be fuzzy to the touch. Leaves typically turn yellow and brown in the fall.
Boxelders (Acer negundo) are one of the easiest maple trees to identify, thanks to the leaf structure. Boxelder maple trees are the only maple tree variety to have divided leaves, and each leaf will have three to five leaflets that are a light green and turn yellow in the fall. Similarly, the tiny clusters of flowers that develop in the spring take on a yellow-green hue.
Boxelders are also easy to spot by size. They have shorter trunks, about 30 to 60 feet high, compared to other maple trees. The bark is gray to light brown that will become covered in ridges over time.
True to its name, the bigleaf maple (Acer macrophyllum) has large, five-lobed leaves that are up to 12 inches wide. Leaves have a glossy, dark green color that turns to yellow in the fall. In spring, yellow-green clusters of flowers will grow. This tree is common on the Western coasts of North America.
The bark of bigleaf maples starts out gray, but over time, it takes on a reddish brown tone that helps differentiate younger and more mature trees. The tree bark also becomes deeply ridged as it ages. If the big leaves don’t tip you off, the size of a bigleaf maple tree will—as the tallest maple tree species in North America, this type can grow over 100 feet tall.
If you’ve confirmed there are maple trees in your lawn, or you are prepping to plant maple tree varieties on your property, you’ll want to know how to care for them properly. Here are some common ways to care for growing and mature maple trees.
With maple tree varieties native to various parts of the world, there are varieties that tolerate a pretty wide range of U.S. Hardiness Zones. Many common maple varieties will grow in Hardiness Zones 3 through 9.
You’ll first want to plant trees during the right time of year: during early spring or fall. Most maple trees prefer full or partial sunlight, but how much light your maple tree needs depends on your climate. Maple trees growing in cooler climates benefit from full sunlight, but maples in warmer climates should have some shade to prevent the leaves from wilting.
To give your maple tree the best possible growing environment, ensure the soil is well-draining and more acidic, about 5.0 to 7.0 pH and no higher than 7.3 pH. Fine to medium soils and sandy or clay soils are good for many maple trees.
Maple trees thrive best in moist soil, and these trees will be their healthiest with about 1.5 inches of water per week. They can tolerate some drought once they are established and mature, but look for browning or curling leaves to determine if the tree is stressed from lack of moisture.
Maple trees won’t need pruning very often to stay healthy, making them a good choice for low-maintenance landscaping. But you will want to remove dead, dying, diseased, or broken branches as needed. If you do notice these issues, it’s best to prune your trees in late spring or summer to avoid a mess of sap on your pruning tools.
With its many varieties and distinctions, DIY maple tree identification is possible with effort and patience. Hiring a tree planting service near you is a more straightforward way to ensure proper identification. These pros can tell you not only the type of maple tree you're looking at but also decipher its condition and diagnose any problems if necessary.
Planting a tree costs anywhere from $150 to over $2,000 per tree, depending on the type and size of the tree. You can DIY for about $70 to $210, while hiring a local arborist will cost about $50 to $150 per hour plus the cost of the tree. To save money, you might want to purchase a bare root tree or buy younger (and therefore smaller) tree varieties that grow quickly, like red maples.
The most common maple trees used for syrup are red, sugar, and silver maples. First, look for opposite branching systems, where two branches grow outward from the same place on opposite sides of the main stem. This process is a helpful way to identify maple trees in the winter when the leaves are gone, but the trees are ready to be tapped for sap.
You may be looking to identify maple trees to use for home improvement projects. In that case, you can tell hard maples by looking at their leaves. Leaves will have a U-shaped dip, or sinus, between the points, or lobes, of the leaves. Leaves of soft maples tend to have V-shaped sinuses.
If you already have the cut wood in front of you, look for a light, uniform color to identify hard maple wood and check for variations of red, gray, or brown streaks and an overall darker color in soft maple wood.
The most common maple tree species in North America include sugar, red, silver, box elder, paperbark, and bigleaf maples. There are about 12 total maple tree species native to North America, but these six are the most common. Boxelder maples have the largest range of North American varietals, and bigleaf maples are the largest species of maple trees native to this region.
It's easy to misidentify trees that appear to be maple trees due to similarities in leaf shapes. Sweetgum, sycamore, and yellow poplar all have leaf shapes and appearances similar to maples. The fact that around a dozen maple tree varieties exist, only about half of which are considered common, makes misidentification an often typical occurrence.
Maple trees start the growing season by developing small groups of red flowers where the tree's fruit, the samaras, will appear in the coming weeks. Later in spring, the samaras, which many call whirlybirds or similar names, develop into single-winged seed carriers that spin when falling or drifting in the wind.
