If you’re still not sure which maple you’re looking up into, it’s probably a sugar, because the red’s buds and branches are easier to identify. The sleek buds of the sugar maple often can’t be seen at all, lying as they do much closer to the narrow angle of the 45-degree branchlets. The buttony buds of the red maple clearly show on the ends of the perpendicular branchlets.
Looking up into the crown of a mature maple, this effect can also be very distinct. Red’s often grow 90 degrees out from the main branches, sugar’s at more like 45 degrees. This pattern carries over into the geometry of young branchlets. Red buds also stick out nearly perpendicular from the branch, or usually do, compared with sugar’s, which are reliably fixed at about 45 degrees from the branch. Sugar’s are sleek and pointy, shaped more like bullets than buttons. Red maple’s are short and knobby, almost like buttons that someone sewed to the end of every branch. Indeed, if you see these two species growing side by side from across a field, the effect on a sunny spring day is so pronounced – burgundy versus honey – that you’ll wonder how you ever failed to tell these maples apart. Sugar maple, by contrast, is golden brown – a honey-colored or medium amber hue that’s very apparent on the buds and flower stems. The buds are also red, as are the stems that support the flowers and samaras. Red maples are distinctly red in all but their outer bark, though young bark on saplings or branches of red maples does have a burgundy cast to it, almost as if someone had sprayed a gray coat of paint atop a burgundy primer.
If you can hone your skills now, you’ll be much better prepared for the trying days of mid-winter. Overall, this makes the sugar maple’s leaves broader and more rounded than the narrower, pointier leaves of the red.īut if you don’t have leaves, which you don’t for much of the year, including sugaring season, spring is the best time for getting started. The red maple’s lobes, meanwhile, are separated by serrated, V-shaped valleys. The three lobes of a sugar maple’s leaf are separated by smooth, U-shaped valleys – think U as in sUgar. The leaf margins tell the main story: sugar maples have smooth edges while red maples are toothed or serrated. Mid-summer is the easiest time to tell red from sugar, assuming you can clearly see some leaves from the ground.
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