Part 34
The wood of this tree is hard, strong, and dense. It is three pounds lighter per cubic foot than white oak, and theoretically it rates a little lower in fuel value, but those who use both woods as fuel consider maple worth more. It is thirty per cent stronger than white oak, and fifty-three per cent stiffer. The wood is diffuse-porous, that is, the pores are not arranged in bands or rows, as they usually are in oaks, but are scattered in all parts. They are too small to be seen with the naked eye, but under a magnifying glass they are visible in large numbers. The yearly ring is not very distinct, because of the slight contrast between spring and summerwood. The medullary rays are numerous but small. In wood sawed along radial lines, from heart to sap, small silvery flecks are numerous. These are the medullary rays. They add something to the appearance of quarter-sawed maple, but not enough to induce mills to turn out much of it.
Such figures as maple has are brought out best in tangential sawing--that is, cut like a slab off the side of the log. Three distinct figures are recognized in sugar maple, and to some extent they belong to other maples. These forms of wood are known as birdseye, curly, and blister maple. They are accidental forms and exist in certain trees only. Students of wood structure are not wholly agreed as to the cause of these forms, but one of them, the birdseye effect, is believed to be due to adventitious buds which distort the wood in their vicinity. These buds start near the center of the tree when it is small, but never succeed in forcing their way out. They remain just beneath the bark during most or the whole of the tree’s life. A pin-like core, resembling a fine thread, connects the birdseye with the tree’s pith. This thread is the pith of the embryonic branch formed by the bud which never breaks through the bark. When the wood is sawed tangentially, small, dark-brown points or dots show the center of the buds, or the pith line connecting it with the tree’s center. Curly maple and blister maple are not believed to be formed in the same way as birdseye.
The uses of sugar maple are nearly universal, where a hard, white wood is wanted. Many large trees contain little colored heart, and trees are generally fifty years old before they have any. More maple is worked into flooring than into any other one commodity. Mills in Michigan alone, in 1910, made 185,611,662 feet of maple flooring. It was shipped to practically every civilized country in the world. Many builders consider it the best wooden floor that can be laid. In a test made in a large store in Philadelphia some years ago, a marble floor wore through sooner than maple, when the same wear was on both.
Nearly all kinds and classes of furniture have places for maple, either as outside material or inside frames, drawer bottoms, or partitions. Vehicle manufacturers employ it for heavy axles, running gear, parts of automobiles, sleigh runners and frames, and hand sleds. It is made into handles from gimlet sizes to cant hooks. Gymnasium apparatus owes much to the whiteness, smoothness, and strength of maple. Woodenware from toothpicks to ironing boards; from butcher blocks to butter molds; from door knobs to die blocks, is dependent on maple for some of its best material. It is largely used for boxes, in both solid and veneer form. Only two woods are now employed in larger amounts for veneers in the United States than maple. They are red gum and yellow pine.
Maple is one of the three woods most largely employed in hardwood distillation in this country; beech and birch are the others. Maple sugar is a product of this tree almost exclusively, and the business is large. In some parts of New England it is claimed that a grove is worth more for sugar than the land is worth for agriculture.
SILVER MAPLE (_Acer saccharinum_) is generally called soft maple by lumbermen. It is known also as white maple, river maple, silver-leaved maple, swamp maple, and water maple. The sinuses of the leaves are very deep. The lighter color of its bark and the pale green of the leaves distinguish soft maple at a glance from sugar maple when both are in full leaf. The greenish-yellow flowers open in early spring, and the seeds are ripe in April or May, depending on the season and region. The seeds have large wings and fly well. They germinate in a few days after they find suitable soil, and before the end of the summer the seedlings have grown several leaves. The vigor thus displayed continues until the tree is large. It is a fast grower, and for that reason has been extensively planted as a street and park tree. The wisdom of doing so is doubtful, for this maple throws out long limbs which are often broken by wind. The trunk is subject to disease, and a row of old soft maples nearly always presents a ragged, unkempt, neglected appearance. As to beauty of form and crown, there is little comparison between it and the planted sugar maple. Soft maples in forests range from seventy-five to 120 feet in height, and two to four in diameter; that is, they attain about the same size as sugar maples. The species covers a million square miles, practically the whole country east of the Mississippi, some west of that river, and most of eastern Canada.
It is a useful wood for many purposes. The custom of mixing this with sugar maple makes it impossible to clearly separate the two woods afterwards. It is the opinion of some well-informed manufacturers that about five per cent of the total maple cut in the United States is soft maple. The ratio is less in the North and more in the South. The wood is hard, strong, rather brittle, easily worked, pale brown with thick, white sapwood. Some rather large trunks have no sapwood. It is in general use, but not for as many purposes as sugar maple. The largest places found for it are as flooring and woodenware, though furniture and boxes, particularly veneer boxes, consume much. Its weight is three-fourths that of sugar maple. The largest trees and the best wood grow in the lower Ohio valley.
[Illustration]
RED MAPLE
[Illustration: RED MAPLE]
RED MAPLE
(_Acer Rubrum_)
This tree’s names describe it. Some refer to color of leaves, flowers, and fruit, others to situation where it grows best. It is known as red maple and swamp maple; also as water maple, white maple, scarlet maple, and shoepeg maple. New York Indians called it ah-we-hot-kwah, which meant red flower. Most trees looked alike to Indians, and when they gave a name, it was descriptive.
The redness of this maple is so marked that it cannot escape notice. The flowers, fruit, twigs, and leaves all possess the property at one time or another during the season. The flower comes before the leaf, during the first warm days of spring. That is pretty early in the South, and later in the North. The flowers are bright scarlet, and very conspicuous, growing in umbel-like, drooping clusters. The staminate and pistillate ones frequently grow on different trees, and always in separate clusters.
The fruit ripens quickly, and is sometimes almost mature before the leaves appear. The date of ripening depends upon latitude. The tree’s range north and south exceeds a thousand miles and that makes much difference in climate. In the South the fruit outstrips the leaves and has about reached maturity before the unfolding leaves are large enough to hide it; but in New England and New York the leaves are large before the fruit is mature. The seed is the characteristic maple key, with a wing to carry it. The fruit--and by that term the seed with its attached wing is meant--is bright red, and a tree loaded with the vivid clusters is a beautiful spectacle. Two seeds are generally fast together, and they make surprising flights in that condition, passing with whirling motion through the air. Gravity spins them, but wind carries them forward, and the random of their flight depends on the strength of the wind, which happens to be blowing when they sever their connection with the tree.
The seeds germinate quickly when they light on damp soil. If they do not find such situations, they soon perish; because they do not retain their vitality long. By the middle of summer the young trees have several leaves, and from that time on the struggle is mainly among themselves for space and moisture, because they stand so thick that it is a survival of the fittest.
The young twigs are generally red in spring, but they do not present as conspicuous a mass as the flowers and fruit do. The leaves are simple, with long reddish petioles. They have three or five lobes, the lower pair often entirely missing, and small if present. Each lobe has a pointed apex, and is irregularly serrate. The base of the leaf is rounded; also the sinuses, which extend far into the body of the leaf. The upper surface of the leaf is bright green, the lower a silvery-white. In the fall this tree is entitled to the name scarlet; for then the brilliant hues of the leaves are remarkably fine.
The range of red maple covers more than a million square miles, and touches every state east of the Mississippi river, and west of that stream it extends from South Dakota to Texas. It prefers rather swampy ground, but wants fertile soil. It is frequently found on the banks of creeks and rivers, and rarely on hillsides. It is most abundant in the South, particularly in the lower Mississippi valley, while trees of larger size are found in the valley of the lower Ohio. In the North it takes more to low wet swamps where it sometimes grows in such thickets as almost to exclude other species.
The best red maple trees attain a height of 100 feet or more, and a diameter of four feet or less. The average size is seventy feet high and two in diameter. The form of the tree, like that of all other maples, depends much upon the situation in which it grows. Good saw timber is not often cut from this species near the outer borders of its range.
The wood is about three-fourths as strong as hard maple, and is five pounds lighter per cubic foot, but is about six pounds heavier than soft or silver maple. It may, therefore, be considered that in some important points red maple is midway between hard and soft maple. In color it is light brown, slightly tinged with red. The sapwood is thick and lighter in color than the heart. The tree is usually not of rapid growth. The contrast between the springwood and summerwood is not strong. The wood is very porous, but the pores are so small that the unaided eye cannot discern them. The medullary rays are numerous, but thin, and are seldom considered in working the lumber.
Mills which saw this maple do not separate the lumber from other maples. The woodsman knows the difference, but the lumberman does not consider it worth while to pile the sawed stock separately. It sometimes goes to market as hard maple, sometimes as soft, but never under its own name. Consequently, it has no uses which are not also common to other maples. Lumbermen cut it when they find it mixed with other hardwoods where they are carrying on logging operations.
Red maple is made into flooring, interior finish, and veneer box material. Veneers are also made for furniture. These are the most important uses for the wood, but the manufacturers of woodenware employ it for numerous commodities, such as trays, bowls, ironing boards, grain scoops, snow shovels, clothes racks, garment hangers, and clothes pins. This species shows birdseye effect similar to that of sugar maple, but less of the stock goes to market. Logs with birdseye wood are generally reduced to veneer by the rotary process. Curly and wavy grains also occur in this maple. The wavy grain was much sought after by the early hunters who equipped their long rifles with stocks. Having found a piece of timber with the desired wavy grain, the hunter proceeded to shave and whittle until the stock was fitted to the barrel, and the gun was complete. Some of the stocks made with no tools but an ax, drawing knife, and a pocket knife, were works of art which are worthy of preservation in museums.
Occasionally some unknown rural Stradivari made a violin and selected the curly wood of red maple for the neck and sides. A few of these instruments are floating about the country, but an age of fifty or a hundred years has not yet imparted classic value to them, but the wood is unsurpassed in delicacy of grain and figure.
Sugar may be manufactured from red maple, but in smaller quantity than from sugar maple. In the days when every frontier settlement did its own manufacturing, inks and dyes were made from the bark of this tree. The tannin boiled from the bark was treated with sulphate of iron, and it became ink; when alum was added it became black dye; when the sulphate of iron was omitted, and alum alone was put in, a cinnamon-colored dye resulted.
Red maple is one of the most desirable trees for planting in parks and by roadsides. Nurserymen complain that seedlings are more difficult to manage than silver maples; nor do they grow as rapidly, but the trees are worth much more when once established. They have shorter and stronger branches than silver maple; are less liable to be attacked by disease; are more handsome in every way; but they demand damper soil, and succeed poorly in any other. That drawback tends to restrict the artificial planting of this tree.
MOUNTAIN MAPLE (_Acer spicatum_) is known also as moose maple, low maple, and water maple. It is a small tree at its best, seldom more than twenty-five feet high and eight inches in diameter, while in most parts of its range it is only a shrub. Its best growth is on mountain slopes of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. It likes moist, rich hillsides, and does not object to shade. The flowers come late, but within a month or six weeks after the bloom appears, the fruit is full grown, but it remains on the tree till autumn. The tree’s bark is smooth and very thin. The absence of stripes distinguishes this tree from striped maple, which has nearly the same range. Mountain maple grows from Maine to Minnesota, southward to Michigan, and along the mountains to Georgia. The wood is light, soft, brown tinged with red. The small size of the trunk forbids its conversion into ordinary lumber. The only commercial use reported for it is in Pennsylvania where it is cut along with other hardwoods for destructive distillation.
FLORIDA MAPLE (_Acer floridanum_) is a species according to some, and according to others is a variety of the hard maple. Its range is limited, and the available quantity of the wood is small. It is found in the swamps of southern Georgia and western Florida, and westward to Texas, Louisiana, and southern Arkansas. Near the southwestern limits of its range in Texas and Mexico, it is often a shrub; but in the best part of its range it becomes a tree fifty or sixty feet high and two or three in diameter. The wood passes for hard maple when sawed into lumber, but it is not often sent to sawmills. The makers of bent wood rustic furniture in some of the southern towns, particularly in Louisiana, have found the slender branches of Florida maple well suited to that purpose.
DRUMMOND MAPLE (_Acer rubrum drummondii_) is a variety of red maple, not a separate species. Its range lies in the coastal plain of Alabama and Georgia, western Louisiana, eastern Texas, southwestern Tennessee, and southern Arkansas. It grows in deep swamps, and has three-lobed leaves, and large-winged fruit, ripening in April and May. The wood is too scarce to be important in the lumber trade, but where it can be had it is used. Violin makers have procured some finely curled wood of this maple in Union Parish, Louisiana. Some of the wood from that district has been made into gunstocks also.
WHITEBARK MAPLE (_Acer leucoderme_) has been classed as a variety of sugar maple, and also as a separate species. It is named from the light gray color of the bark of young stems; but the color turns dark with age. The tree is usually twenty or thirty feet high with a diameter of a foot or more. The wood is of good quality, but no uses, except fuel, have been reported. Trees are not abundant, but the range covers parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas. It is occasionally planted as a shade tree along the streets of towns of Georgia and Alabama.
[Illustration]
OREGON MAPLE
[Illustration: OREGON MAPLE]
OREGON MAPLE
(_Acer Macrophyllum_)
Botanists prefer to call this tree broadleaf maple. The name is not inappropriate, as its extraordinarily broad leaves constitute the most striking feature of the tree where it stands in the woods. The leaf is usually wider than it is long. Some exceed a foot in both measurements. Bigleaf maple is not an uncommon name for the tree in Oregon, where it attains its highest development in damp valleys where the soil is good. The name white maple is not particularly descriptive of any feature of the tree, though the name is applied in both Oregon and Washington. In California it is known simply as maple. There is small likelihood in that region that it will be confused with any other member of the maple household; nor is there much danger of such a thing in any part of the Pacific coast, for, though four species of maple occur there, no one of them bears close enough resemblance to this one to be mistaken for it.
The Oregon maple’s range north and south covers twenty degrees of latitude. In that particular it is not much surpassed, if surpassed at all, by any maple of this country. Its northern limit lies in Alaska, its southern close to the Mexican boundary, in San Diego county, California. Its range east and west is restricted. It has a width of about one hundred and fifty miles in California, where it grows from the coast to the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. An altitude of 5,600 feet appears to be the limit of its range upward. It attains altitudes above 5,000 feet at several points in the Sierra Nevada range. It descends nearly to sea level. Its geographical range is similar to the ranges of several other Pacific coast species which occupy long ribbons of territory stretching north and south parallel with the coast of the Pacific ocean.
This maple’s leaves change to a clear reddish-yellow before falling. Flowers appear after the leaves are grown, and the seeds ripen late in autumn. Some of them hang until late in winter, but the habit varies in different parts of the range, as is natural in view of its great extension north and south. The trees which stand in open ground are very abundant seeders, but those in dense stands produce sparingly, in that
## particular following the habit of most trees. This maple often grows in
dense, nearly pure stands in Oregon and Washington where soil and other conditions are favorable.
The sizes and forms of Oregon maple vary greatly. John Muir spoke of forests whose trees were eighty or one hundred feet high, so dense with leaves and so abundantly supplied with branches that moss and ferns formed a canopy with foliage and limbs high over head, like an aerial garden; while George B. Sudworth described it in certain situations as a short-stemmed, crooked tree from twenty-five to thirty feet high and under a foot in diameter.
This maple has been called the most valuable hardwood of the Pacific coast, but that claim is made also for other trees. Some persons rate it with the hard maple of the East, in properties which commend it for use. It is doubtful if the claim can be substantiated. According to Sargent’s figures for strength, stiffness, weight, and fuel value, it lacks much of equalling the eastern tree. It is twelve pounds per cubic foot lighter; has not three-fourths the fuel value; and is little more than half as strong or as stiff. The comparison is more in favor of the western tree when color of wood and appearance of grain are considered. The wood is light brown with pale tint of red. The rings of annual growth are tolerably distinct, with a thin, dark line separating the summerwood of one year from the springwood of the next. The pores are scattered with fair evenness in all parts of the ring. They are small and numerous. The medullary rays are thin and abundant. In quarter-sawed wood they show much the same as in hard maple, but are rather darker in color. The mirrors are decidedly tinged with brown. The wood is reported poor in resisting decay when in contact with the soil.
The largest use of Oregon maple appears to be for furniture, second, for interior finish, and following these are numerous miscellaneous uses. Statistics of the cut of this wood, as shown by sawmill reports, are unsatisfactory. Census returns include it with all other maples of the country, without figures for species. The cut of maple for all the western states seems too small to give this wood justice. The amount reported used in Washington, Oregon, and California exceeds the total reported sawmill cut in the West.
Oregon maple is an important handlewood. The smooth grain appeals to broom makers. The wood is made into ax handles, but for that use it is much below hickory, or even hard maple or white oak. It is converted into pulleys in Washington, also into saddle trees, and tent toggles. Boat makers employ it for finish material, in which capacity it fills the same place, and must meet the same requirements as in interior finish for houses. Curly or wavy wood is occasionally found and this is worked into finish and also into furniture. The figure is as handsome as in eastern maple, but birdseye is less frequent. Counter tops for stores and bar tops for saloons are sometimes made of figured maple. It is seen also in grill work and show cases, but in order to show the figured wood to the best advantage it should be worked in flat surfaces.
Oregon maple is converted into flooring of the ordinary tongued and grooved kind, and also into parquet flooring. Rotary veneers are made into boxes and baskets. Solid logs are turned for rollers of various sizes and kinds. Mill yards use them for offbearing lumber, and house movers find them about the best local material to be had. This maple has been successfully stained in imitation of mahogany, and is said to pass satisfactory tests where the color is the principal consideration.