Wild maple is a rare sight in Ireland

MOST of the leaves have now gone from the deciduous trees in the wood.

The ash is quite bare, apart from clusters of seed, the limes turned buttery yellow and held on until the first week of the month, then the beech leaves turned copper and gold and started to fall. Only the oaks remain defiantly green.

Around a week ago while I was walking the dog and monitoring the progress of the final phase of autumn I came across a rarity. Actually there were three of them — three medium sized field maples growing amongst the oak, ash and lime.

Field maple isn’t really that rare a tree. It’s native in southern England and, apparently, a bit of Wales. In parts of south-eastern England it’s a common hedgerow species and in Ireland it’s quite often planted in parks and larger gardens.

What is unusual is to find it growing and apparently self-seeded in a semi-wild mixed woodland. In fact in a lifetime of tree-watching this is only the second Irish wood I’ve found it in, and the first one was in Northern Ireland.

Both of the Irish woods, one in Kildare and one in Fermanagh, had originally been part of large private estates. This probably explains how the species got there in the first place. Throughout the nineteenth century many owners of these grand estates became avid tree collectors, often competing with each other to import choice specimens.

Some of them also specialised in certain types of trees. The most popular were probably exotic pine species from around the world. A collection of pines was called a ‘pinetum’ and its owner would proudly show off rare species from Asia or the Americas.

Probably the second most collectable trees were maples. There are about 150 species of them growing in Europe, Asia and North America. About 20 to 25 species and some cultivated varieties are regularly planted in this country. I don’t collect on the scale of those Victorian land-owners but I have specimens of sugar maple, moosewood maple, Norway maple, field maple and, of course, sycamore, which is also a maple, growing on my own land.

The attraction of maples depends largely on their leaves and their bark.

The Canadians found the leaf shape so attractive they incorporated it into their national flag. My moosewood is one of the ‘snake-bark’ maples, a group grown for the colours and intricate patterns on their bark which do rather resemble the patterns on the back of some snakes.

I didn’t plant mine in a very good place and it’s rather dominated by larger species. But a friend of mine has a magnificent specimen growing by his front gate. The moosewood is a native of eastern Canada and the eastern United States. All the other snake bark maples come from the Far East.

The field maples that I found in my local wood are, it has to be admitted, not the showiest members of the family. They are quite small, reaching a maximum height of about 25 metres (compared, for example, to 38 metres for sycamore). Grown in the open they usually produce a dense dome of twiggy growth that is wider than it is tall. But the specimens I found were surrounded by taller species and were upright and spindly, reaching for the light.

The leaves are a typical five-lobed maple shape but very small, about the size of a match box. They are carried on long red stalks. When I looked up my Collins Tree Guide it said that the bark ‘feels warm in cold weather’.

This is intriguing. The weather is getting colder and I must go back to the wood and put it to the test. If it’s true I know I’ll be puzzling over the reason for the phenomenon.

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