Background

Growing up in the rural countryside of central Ohio means that I was intimately familiar with the deciduous trees that would begin to glow every autumn with yellow, gold, orange, and red. One tree always stood out among the rest for its unique fluorescent orange-red fiery colors. When all other trees started to turn dull and lose their leaves, the red trees were the last to stay around. They were the bright sugar maples that always stood out in autumn. I was amazed to learn that these trees were also responsible for the syrup we would put on our pancakes at breakfast. As I have gotten older, I love learning about foraging and self-sufficient diets, of which “tapping” maple trees would be a part of.

I grew up being made fun of for the fascination I had with the natural world around me. Often being told that I was off “chasing butterflies” when I was caught not paying attention. I would rather spend time out in the sun, looking for wild flowers and making mud pies in the creek that ran behind my house. Every season in Ohio had something new to offer me; the wet calm of springtime that brought a fresh smell that smelled like new beginnings and vegetation, the hot blanket of summer where at times it was so colorful it was overwhelming, the homey-ness of fall that somehow was exciting even as everything turned dark and brown, and finally, the crip clean of the winter. Every day holds the possibility of something new in Ohio. I see something new every season that I have never seen before. Sugar maple trees are the epitome of things in nature that fascinate me. Colorful, versatile, and sustainable.

When I came to Kenyon, one of my favorite aspects of campus was the integration of nature and the campus. I never felt like I was too far from the kinds of things that fascinated me growing up, or felt like I had to go out of my way to rediscover that nature. Shortly after going back to school every August, the campus would become lit up with every shade of yellow, orange, and red. I quickly picked a favorite tree on campus: A sugar maple with a bench underneath its branches, located between the church and the gallery on Middle Path. I would often sit on the bench between classes, stop there when I had nothing to do, or sit on the bench as I talked to my mom on the phone. Something about the shape of its branches felt protective. When we were tasked with picking a spot on campus, the tree immediately came to mind for me. I enjoyed paying attention to the changes it made through the semester, leading up to being one of the last trees to experience the loss of leaves.

Scientific Findings

When I started looking into the maple trees, I was not always sure what I wanted to know or learn. One of my main questions was why do sugar maple trees turn bright red when other trees rarely gain that level of vibrance? At the most basic level, when trees are placed under the stress of colder temperatures and less sunlight, they convert leaf sugars into anthocyanin (1). Anthocyanin was thought to be useless for many decades. It was thought to only be visible in the fall when chlorophyll in the leaves began to break down, but new studies are showing that anthocyanin likely plays an important protective role for trees as they enter a fragile state when temperatures drop (2). Studies have shown that red maple leaves are more firmly attached to the tree than yellow leaves, which can explain why sugar maple trees are one of the last trees to lose their leaves in the fall. It also is shown that those red leaves stick around longer to help continue absorbing more sugar and nutrients for longer into the season. Sugar maple trees have years of sugar stored in their trunks because of this and another study from the New Phytologist has shown that the sap we pull from sugar maples to turn into maple syrup, actually has sugars that are on average 3-5 years old, but can even be older at times (3). This same study also found that this storage of sugar is why sugar maples are such resilient trees. In times of drought or pests, they have ample food to continue their survival until their environment returns to normal.

I stumbled upon research that I myself was not necessarily super interested in, but after learning about it, I felt it was necessary to share here. Many of the reasons there are such detailed studies into sugar maples are that scientists and those in the maple syrup industry are concerned that global warming and climate change may destroy the industry. They believe that cool, but not freezing, temperatures are ideal for sugar maple trees to convert the energy they gain during the day to sugar but the findings on that hypothesis are not completely sound yet (4). Climate change could lead to less freezing temperatures than we have historically seen, meaning that the trees have more sugar stored, or it could mean the opposite. At the moment, it is really hard to tell. These questions not only affect scientists and the syrup industry, but Vermont tourism as well. “The Vermont Department of Tourism tallied visitor spending during last year’s (2007) fall tourism season at $363 million” (5).

Conclusion

I learned a lot about sugar maple trees and their significance not only in my life, but also to many industries and scientists that I would have never guessed have put so many millions of dollars into. It is a cultural aspect of life for many Vermont natives just as it is a food source and aesthetic part of life for others. In my research I found this quote that does not necessarily fit with the rest of my paper, but felt too important to leave out: “The sugar woods are viewable as spaces where people move, live, and interact, with one another and with nature" (6). I think that is a really beautiful sentiment that I can understand wholeheartedly.

Footnotes:

1: University of Vermont. (2008, November 26). When Good Maples Go Red: Why Leaves Change Color In The Fall. ScienceDaily. Retrieved December 13, 2020 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/11/081122084655.htm

2: When Good Maples Go Red: Why Leaves Change Color In The Fall.

3: Muhr, J., Messier, C., Delagrange, S., Trumbore, S., Xu, X. and Hartmann, H. (2016), How fresh is maple syrup? Sugar maple trees mobilize carbon stored several years previously during early springtime sap‐ascent. New Phytol, 209: 1410-1416. https://doi.org/10.1111/nph.13782

4: When Good Maples Go Red: Why Leaves Change Color In The Fall.

5: When Good Maples Go Red: Why Leaves Change Color In The Fall.

6: Lange, M. A. (2017). Meanings of maple: an ethnography of sugaring. The University of Arkansas Press.