Flowers of the silver maple, Acer saccharinum, at Ashbridge's Bay this week. © BCP 2010
Have you started to sneeze yet?
Just asking (hoping no) because our local silver maples (Acer saccharinum) are in full bloom. One of the northeast’s three native maples, according to several sources I checked, the silver is the earliest flowering plant to bloom in our area. Botanists call it monoecious, meaning it has both male and female flowers on the same plant. The male, or staminate flower is yellowish red (see above) and the female, or pistillate one, is red.
According to the website of the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay, our silver maples flower very early and disperse their pollen in March. “The flowers on any given tree all open within a few days and the flowering period for any given locality may be very short. Seeds are produced by early June and drop soon thereafter,” the site says.
Sounds like extremely bad news for the allergy sufferers among us. For the rest, those of us lucky enough not to drip and hachoo! when we pass by flowering trees, these maples are a lovely sight to behold, for they are surely telling us that new season of explosive growth has begun.
© BCP 2010
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