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Planting
Days to maturity
Seasonal yields
Sow indoors · Direct sow · Transplant outdoors
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Plant · P-030
Red Maple
Acer rubrum
Red maple is one of the most adaptable trees in eastern North America, thriving on everything from swampy bottomland to dry rocky hillsides and putting out red flowers before almost anything else blooms in late winter. Its sap can be tapped for syrup, though at roughly half the sugar content of sugar maple, and the wood turns into furniture, flooring, tool handles and firewood. The one thing that catches people off guard: wilted or dried fallen leaves are toxic to horses, causing fatal red-blood-cell damage, so pastured trees need their leaves kept out of reach rather than the tree itself removed. It also casts dense shade and a mat of surface roots that make it hard to grow turf or other plants close to the trunk.
Record at a glance
Growing profile
- Sun
- Full Sun · Partial Sun
- USDA zone
- USDA 3–9
- Soil
- Loam · Sand · Clay
- Moisture
- Moist · Wet · Moderate · Dry
Vertical layer
Canopy- Soil pH
- 4.5–7
- Plant type
- Deciduous Tree
- Mature height
- 40–70 ft
- Mature spread
- 30–50 ft
- Plant spacing
- 25–30 ft
- Root type
- Fibrous-shallow
- Spread pattern
- Seed
Keep exploring
Similar plants
Discover more plants with shared forest layers or growing conditions.
Alligator Juniper
Juniperus deppeana
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Canopy · USDA 6–9
Almond
Prunus amygdalus
Almond flowers earlier than almost any other cultivated tree, which is its biggest weakness as much as its gift to early pollinators - a warm…
Canopy · USDA 7–9
American Basswood
Tilia americana
American Basswood is famous for the bees - mature trees hum audibly for several feet around when they bloom in early summer, giving one of…
Canopy · USDA 3–8
American Beech
Fagus grandifolia
American Beech is a slow, long-lived shade tree that can establish and eventually fruit even under an existing forest canopy, unlike almost…
Canopy · USDA 3–9
American Chestnut
Castanea dentata
American chestnut once carried the sweetest nut of any chestnut species and covered more than 200 million acres of eastern forest, but an…
Canopy · USDA 5–8
American Elm
Ulmus americana
American Elm is a native stream-bank tree that grows into a 60 to 80 foot vase-shaped shade crown and, once mature, becomes one of the…
Canopy · USDA 3–9
The deeper layer
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- Primary
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- Secondary
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- Byproduct
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Behind the record
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