By Ryan Trapani
photography by the author.
The first time I encountered sugar maple (Acer saccharum) was when I was 9 or 10 years old. My brother Kyle (four years younger) and I were climbing two large trees behind our house outside New Paltz, Ulster County. While climbing up the trunk and down the branches we noticed there was sap extruding in streams from the bark. As children often do, we curiously tasted the unknown. To our surprise, it was sweet! We climbed higher and squirreled along the branches, licking streams of sweet sap. I remember being as happy as a tree sloth. I have always been attracted to sweet and sugary things, but this one was strange and new and on a tree bearing no fruit! Each year I would look over the large tree for extruding sap but never found it as plentiful or as sweet. For me, the taste lingered and materialized into tapping sugar maple trees almost 15 years later.
The discovery of sugar maple’s sweet property is entrenched in mystery and legend dating back before colonists encountered North America. One Iroquois legend tells of Chief Woksis. One day in spring, Woksis pulled his tomahawk from a tree before going hunting. On that warm day, the gash began to drip sap into a bark vessel that happened to be placed under the gash. His wife, needing water to cook their meal with, then used the sap instead of fetching more water. Returning home from hunting, Woksis noticed a sweet odor, and when he ate the cooked meat he also tasted a peculiar sweetness. Thus the seed was sown for sugar maple’s unique use as a staple sweetener. I still believe, however, it was children that discovered the unique sweetness of this tree through their curiosity and thirst for sweet things!
Adults like sweet things, too! If they didn’t, Canada would not have adopted the maple leaf on its national flag in 1965. But maple’s popularity has historically been an American one. Native Americans taught the early settlers how to make granulated maple sugar because vessels for storing syrup were not feasible. Maple sugar was more common than salt for seasoning foods. Back then one may have not remarked “He isn’t worth his salt,” but rather “He isn’t worth his maple.”
In the 19th century maple sugar sold for half the price of sugar cane due to a high import tax in order to discourage the “slave” labor that produced the foreign sweetener. Thomas Jefferson planted a maple orchard near his home in Monticello, Virginia, in support of locally made maple sugar and in direct protest against the slaves used in the West Indies in producing sugar cane. The U.S. continued to outproduce Canada in maple sugar until the import tax on sugar cane was relaxed, which opened the floodgates for the foreign sugar to pour in. In 1860 U.S. maple production peaked at 40 million pounds of maple (granulated) sugar and 1.6 million gallons of maple syrup from 23 states. During the Civil War, the Union Army protested against southern-made sugar cane by consuming only the tree sugar made mostly in the Northeast. In 1949 West Virginia, Vermont and Wisconsin answered Canada’s claim to the sugar tree by naming it as their official state tree. New York State followed suit in 1953.
Sugar maple is a potentially large tree that can reach heights over 100 feet and diameters measured in feet as well. The largest sugar maple (over seven feet in diameter) is found not too far from the U.S. capital in Kitzmiller, Maryland. In the Catskills I have found sugar maples measuring almost five feet across in diameter! Large trees of this caliber can be over 300 years old. Sugar maple ranges from southern Quebec, Ontario and Maine, west into Minnesota, south along the Appalachian Ridge and into Texas and Louisiana. However, according to official USDA Forest Inventory Data, New York State contains the most sugar maple anywhere in the world.
Sugar maple is a patient grower. Unlike some of its rock star counterparts, like trembling aspen or paper birch that can only tolerate the spotlight where they can quickly out-compete others, sugar maple can patiently wait (backstage) in the shade of others. It does not waste what little energy it gathers from the sun for the present but, instead, invests it into the future in hope of an opening in the canopy where it may dominate for many decades or even centuries. Once established, sugar maple can dominate entire stands, creating forests of pure sugar maple. These pure stands create intense competition for sunlight and trees that are relatively branch-free, making them valuable as saw-logs. The leaf litter created by pure maple stands is slow to decay and creates a mat on the forest floor that can inhibit the germination of other hardwood seedlings, thereby sustaining maple’s dominance. As the leaf litter finally decomposes, large amounts of calcium are released, fulfilling its requirement for calcium-rich soils. Although other trees may find it hard to live with maple, many herbaceous plants and wildflowers prosper in the calcium-enriched soils; some include trillium, Dutchman’s-breeches, wild sarsaparilla, pokeweed, wild ginger, and the famous American ginseng.
Listing all of sugar maple’s uses is beyond this article’s scope. As aforementioned, maple sugar has been important to humans for seasoning food, medicine and substances that otherwise seem inedible. The maple industry has come a long way in the last 500 years, but the process remains relatively the same. Maple sap is typically two percent in sugar content when it is gathered from the tree and is then boiled down and concentrated. Water is evaporated away, while more sap is added. When the concentration reaches approximately 67 percent it is considered pure maple syrup. At approximately 100 percent it is considered granulated sugar. Adjusting the concentration and knowing when and how to control crystallization leads to other maple products, such as maple cream, maple molten sugar, and jack-wax (sugar on snow). These are all purely maple with no additives. In fact, maple granulated sugar was the only thing Native Americans and early settlers made because storage and transportation challenged maple syrup.
Native Americans tapped maple trees by making a gash in the tree, collecting sap in paper birch bark vessels and boiling the sap down in hollowed out logs. They transferred hot rocks constantly into the sap to keep it boiling. Once it became sugar it was repacked in birch bark boxes. Early settlers used wooden spouts or augers to tap the trees and wooden buckets to collect the sap. Sap was boiled down in cast-iron kettles. In the early 19th century, flat-bottomed evaporation pans made from metal greatly increased the surface area for water to be boiled away, increasing efficiency. Buckets were replaced with galvanized pails and then stainless steel. Once made from English tin, evaporators are now mostly of stainless steel with drop flues which increases surface area and efficiency. Machines that increase the sugar content before the sap is boiled, such as Reverse Osmosis (RO) machines, are also used in large operations. Tubing systems, with some on vacuum to increase sap flow, have now replaced bucket-systems and are probably most familiar to the public as their plastic network can be seen near roadsides.
As technology has increased, so has the scale of maple operations. In the 1920s the average producer in Delaware County made approximately 25 gallons from 50 to 100 taps. Today, it is not uncommon for a large commercial producer to make between 250 to 1,000 gallons from 1,000 to 5,000 taps where tens of thousands of dollars are invested in the operation. Many of these large producers in the Catskills and throughout the state open their sugar houses to the public during Maple Weekend, usually in the third and fourth weekend in March.
Nonetheless, in the presence of these large maple producers, New York does not come even close to tapping its potential. After Canada, New York State ranks third in the U.S. behind Vermont and Maine. However, New York taps less than one percent of its potential and also has more potential taps than any other political area in the world. More importantly, Delaware County has more potential taps than any other county in New York State. As the sun sets upon the abandoned fields of Delaware County and the Catskills where cows were once milked for their nectar, perhaps it can rise upon a reforested stand of sugar maples (sugar-bush) being “milked” for their nectar in the future.
Besides sugar, maple trees are used for many things. One important and valuable commodity is timber. New York State has many maple trees since it is centrally located within this tree’s range. Sugar maple grows better in New York State than in most areas. As a result, its wood may serve as an immediate valuable source of income to a forest owner rather than in tapping its value in sugar. Although proper tapping does not reduce the health of the tree, it does reduce the price paid for logs or stumpage value. Trees that are tapped are stained approximately three inches horizontally of each tap-hole and 18 inches vertically. This may change in the future because some may desire tapwood for its unique staining patterns and historical reverence of tap-holes drilled decades ago by generations of sugar makers.
Unadulterated sugar maple wood is extremely sought after both in the U.S. and overseas. It has pale, creamy sapwood and brown heartwood. Logs that contain the most sapwood or quarter-sized heartwoods are considered most valuable. It is often used in veneer because of its attractive wavy pattern. In rare cases, some trees will contain bird’s-eye maple; it is unclear what causes it, but its unique grain can bring more than 40 times the value of regular sugar maple wood.
The wood is strong, hard, and resists abrasion and impact which makes it ideal for flooring, such as for basketball courts. It is also odorless and good for use with food products, such as butcher blocks, bread boxes and salad bowls. Its one drawback is that maple wood can split when a nail is driven into it and sometimes should be predrilled. But it is very easy on tools, and
bends and finishes well. Sugar maple wood is used in hundreds of tools and woodenware. The list is endless but, nonetheless, it is the top-selling hardwood in North America.
Interestingly, the wood was not always revered in the past. In the late 18th century and early 19th century during American agricultural expansion, forests had to be cleared to make room for more shade-intolerant vegetation, such as grasses for livestock. After all the tools, barns and firewood had been made or gathered, moving the wood was too expensive, especially in labor-poor areas. Instead, it was burned and sold as potash to Britain where it was used in soap-making, fertilizer, and the textile industry.
Finally, there is something lacking in this tree! Sugar maple is not the best tree for wildlife. Other trees that provide fruit or nuts are much more valuable to wildlife, such as oak, walnut, serviceberry, mulberry, chestnut, butternut, black cherry, and hickory. Some forest archaeologists believe that wherever humans (Native Americans) probably lived, they fired the landscape which usually removed fire-intolerant trees (sugar maple, red maple, American beech, hemlock, white pine) in order to favor fire-tolerant ones, such as blueberry, oak, hickory, and chestnut. In places too remote or nonconducive to burning, sugar maple was able to fill the gaps. However, some wildlife do benefit from this tree. Birds feed upon its seed which is high in protein and fat and low in carbohydrates. Squirrels feed upon the springtime buds, and some small mammals and birds build nests high up in the crown or inside a cavity.
Deer also feed upon the freshly fallen leaves which are high in calcium. More significant is their intense browsing on sugar maple buds during the winter months when alternative food sources are lacking. In areas where habitat and winter conditions are poor, deer can have a remarkable impact upon sugar maple and other vegetation they prefer. Preferred vegetation such as sugar maple can be reduced or eliminated in certain areas, while unpreferred species are favored. Unpreferred species can include American beech, red maple, and New York fern that are then able to dominate a forest understory under over-browsed conditions. This is becoming quite common throughout our region.
In all, sugar maple is an interesting and valuable tree both extrinsically and intrinsically. Intrinsically, we know it is valuable because of the abundant numbers of leaf peepers (“leafers”) visiting our region each fall to see its red, gold and orange foliage. To others, the roots and crown hold a “store” to satisfy one’s sugar obsession, while others make some really beautiful woodenware to be cherished for generations.
If you have some sugar maple, call the Catskill Forest Association (845-586-3054) or a forester about how to best care for the tree’s health well into the future. In many cases, thinning of poorly growing trees that are competing with better growing ones is required. If you do not have any sugar maple, then plant some. Although you might not benefit from some of the end products of this tree in your lifetime, watching it grow and knowing it may someday provide for others can be beneficial, too. www.catskillforest.org
