The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
‘Hundreds’ of maple seedlings taking over yards
Nicola Improta has a nice backyard in downtown Bethel that is being overrun by small, orange-leaved seedlings.
It’s not chickweed or crabgrass or even dandelions impinging on Improta’s thoughtfully managed garden, but something usually considered more majestic.
The maple tree seedlings are everywhere, particularly in her raised garden beds where the soil is not as compact.
“They are there by the hundreds,” she said. “There’s a lot, but especially in the beds. I’ve got multiple piles going and I do feel kind of bad pulling them out but I definitely can’t let them live here.”
“I went to my sister’s house yesterday and she’s not really a gardener and she was like, ‘What is this poison ivy popping up all over my yard?’” Improta said. “But it’s not. Everybody thinks it’s poison ivy, but it’s these little trees.”
It’s the same for Craig Helmrich in Madison. He has a few acres with some flowering shrubs and trees, including maples, and he said he’s “flabbergasted as to how many seedlings have fallen this year.”
“It must run in cycles or the stars must be all aligned,” he added.
In fact, Helmrich is correct. There is a perfect storm this year of cyclical growth and weather that has gardeners across the state pulling maple seedlings out of the ground as fast as they can, according to Tom Worthley, a forester and extension professor at UConn.
“It’s a very real thing, especially in places where there’s an abundance of both red maple and sugar maple,” he said. “Both species had abundant seed years last year.”
Trees will produce more or less seeds depending on a host of factors. It does go in cycles, Worthley said, but weather can affect seed production as can stress.
“A lot of times they will put their energy into producing an abundant seed crop, as a way of reacting to stress, to reproduce their genetic mix into the world,” he said. Last year, there was a warm and humid summer and, “a lot of the sugar maple trees were under stress from a foliar fungus.”
Put it all together and you get maples popping up like weeds.
“Virtually every sugar maple I looked at had a huge crop of seeds much bigger than I have seen recently, or that is seen typically,” Worthley said. “Red and sugar maples as a species are well known for having high viability rates in their seeds.”
High viability means if you drop a seed into the ground it’s likely to germinate, and maples are known to out-compete many other plants. That doesn’t mean that every seedling will become a tree. Even those that don’t get plucked out by gardeners like Improta might not make it to adulthood, but some will.
“Those little seedlings we’re looking at today are our next generation’s 100year-old trees,” Worthley said.
Right now it’s both red maple and sugar maple seedlings, and you can tell the difference once they produce leaves.
“The red maple leaves will have teeth around the edges of the leaf or what we call the ‘margin’ of the leaf. It’ll have three major lobes and in the margin of the leaf will be kind of sawtoothed,” Worthley said. “A sugar maple leaf will have five lobes and aside from the points of the lobes themselves, there’s no soft teeth. It’s a fairly smooth margin on the leaf.”
In both Helmrich and Improta’s case, it’s sawtoothed red maple leaves.
Worthley hopes that the maple seedlings do take root and flourish, considering the tree deaths Connecticut has seen in recent years. It’s not maples that have been dying, but oaks and ashes, with drought, storms and bugs the culprits.
Emerald ash borers were discovered in the state in 2012 and, as their name implies, are particularly damaging to ash trees. There was a drought in 2015 and 2016, when the spongy moth began to spread. Then there were storms in 2018, which exacerbated the situation.
“Widespread oak mortality, particularly in eastern Connecticut, began in summer 2017 and continued through 2018,” the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said on its website. “By summer 2018, the leaves on many oak trees began to turn brown. This was caused by another insect, the two-lined chestnut borer, which attacks and kills vulnerable oak trees stressed by previous defoliations.”
So, while the maple seedlings have been trouble for gardeners, it’s good news for forestry.
“It has been very encouraging in many areas where we have experienced losses of oaks and ash due to recent insect infestations, to see the forest renew itself,” Worthley said.