How I fell in love with big Maples

I love big Maples.
I love all trees, of course, but there is a special place in my heart for trees I have gotten to know- or tree types I've gotten to know.  This includes the beautiful, fairy-like little Asian Maples, over a hundred species of them, wonderful rugged Pine Trees such as the Ponderosa, Jeffery, Black and Scots Pines (Of the Western North American mountains (first 2) and Europe (last 2), huge rugged Oaks, beautiful pink-flowered Crepe Myrtles with the berries the birds love so much, also of many species in the East Asian to Himalayan Temperate Rainforests like the Asian Maples- and one just outside my childhood kitchen window.
You get the idea.

And I love big Maples.
Let me tell you how I fell in love with big Maples.

It started with me wondering about a song.
It was a Rush song about the small trees in the forest- Maples- rebelling against the big Trees of the Forest- huge Oaks- and, shall we say, cutting them down to size.

How awful!!!
Obviously they have never spoken with a Tree.  A Real Tree would never do that, even if they could.
Not on purpose, certainly!!!

But I wondered- where they came from, were the Maples REALLY the small Trees?
So I looked up English Maples.  Of course, nearly all 70's progressive rock comes from England, and the Oaks are huge there.      Sure enough- the Field Maple, a small- to mid-sized Forest Tree.

Then I remembered- Rush is from Canada!
Only two progressive rock bands of the 70's from outside England, but Rush, of course, is one of them.
And the Canadian Maple is the Sugar Maple.

And Sugar Maples are very big Trees- to over 100 feet tall!

Well, obviously I was wrong about the song, but it put a thought in my head- DO Maples tend to be smaller than Oaks?

All across Europe and North America are huge Oaks.
Are there huge Maples?

So I searched- and I found.
Yes, indeed, there are huge Maples.
Sugar Maples, Silver Maples, Red Maples, all over the Eastern North American Forests.
Sycamore Maples and Norway Maples all across Europe.
Persian, or Velvet, Maples in the forests along the Southern Caspian Forests which one website (which I can't find now) mysteriously referred to as one of the largest Maples.
And the biggest of them all, the Bigleaf Maple of the Pacific Forests, among the huge Conifers.

And as I looked at pictures of these Trees, I fell in love with them.

The Bigleaf Maple already had one of my favorite Internet Trees- a huge Tree with candelabra-like branches of immense size reaching out like loving arms on Treegirl's website which I call the Mother Maple.
I would love to meet the Mother Maple someday.  She lives in Olympic National Park.

But ALL of these Maples- these huge Maples with their magnificent softly rugged, earthy Trunks, deep and otherworldly, rugged but soft, harder-looking on the surface of many Sugar Maples but beautifully rounded-off in the ruggedness, and magnificently earthy- and others, including a huge Sugar Maple in Great Smoky Mountains National Park, with truly soft-looking bark, rugged and earthy and all.

Truly magnificent.

There are other wonderful things about big Maples- the legendary Fall Color, the abundant edible seeds which feed so many animals, and American Indians in the past...
But those Trunks!  Those magnificent, Rainforest-like Trunks!

See for yourself.  Search Champion Silver Maple for a start.

David S. Annderson

For more, go to my main site at sites.google.com/site/davidannfreestories, or just search 'davidannfreestories', all one word.

Enjoy!