Maple

Maple, the English name for the trees of the genus Acer, which gives its name to the sub-order Acerineae of the order Sapindaceae. It includes about 50 living species, natives of the Northern Hemisphere, and 19 species have been described as occurring fossil in the Miocene rocks of Oeningen. The maples are trees or shrubs with opposite, palmately-lobed leaves; inconspicuous flowers in polygamous clusters; and double or two-winged samara? (q.v.) as fruits. The leaves of both fossil and recent maples are commonly blotched with black spots caused by a fungus, Rhytisma. The wings of the samara vary much in size and in shape, being oblong in the common maple and more rounded and less divergent in others. They are rotated by the wind as the fruit falls, like a screw-propeller, and thus disperse the seed to some little distance from the parent tree. A. campestre, the only British species, often only a hedgerow shrub, affords excellent charcoal and a wood susceptible of high polish and sometimes beautifully mottled, which was formerly used for mazer-bowls. A. pseudo-Platanus, the sycamore, a handsome European tree much grown in Britain since the 16th century, and the allied A. plataiwides, the Norway maple, introduced at the end of the 17th century, have fine-grained, white wood, largely used in turnery. A. saccharinum, the sugar or rock maple, and A. rubrum, the scarlet maple, natives of North America, yield a sap, from which -maple sugar is still extensively prepared in the north-eastern United States and Canada. The wood of the latter, in old trees, has a wavy grain known as curled maple, and that of the former varies, producing both blister and bird's-eye maple, which are much prized for inlaying. .4. palmat-um and several other Japanese species are in cultivation, which, like A. rubrum and our own maple, are remarkable for the autumn tints of their foliage. Those American and Japanese trees, which differ in having pinnate leaves, are now separated as the genus Negundo. A variegated form of N. f-raxinifolium is a favourite tree in gardens.