Grown for the color they set loose each fall, in red, orange, and gold. From fast native shade trees to the living sculpture of a Japanese maple, few deciduous trees give a garden more.
Acer barbatum is a medium to large deciduous tree of rounded, oval form, a southern cousin of the northern sugar maple and sometimes filed under Acer saccharum subsp. floridanum or Acer floridanum. The Florida maple is built for heat in a way the northern relative is not, smaller in every part, with leaves that are whitish beneath and a constitution suited to long, humid summers. In the wild these trees favor fertile, moist, well-drained, often calcareous ground, frequently along streams and in rich hammocks from Virginia south to the Florida panhandle and west into Texas.
Acer buergeranum, the trident maple, is named for the neat three-lobed leaves, small and glossy, that point forward like the tines of a fork. This is a small, slow to moderate deciduous tree of eastern China, Korea, and Japan, long held in cultivation across East Asia and carried into Western gardens in the nineteenth century. Few maples wear age so gracefully: the bark exfoliates in gray, orange, and brown plates, revealing a warm inner bark that becomes one of the tree's quiet pleasures in winter.
Acer cissifolium is one of the trifoliate maples, a small deciduous tree whose leaves, divided into three coarsely toothed leaflets, look more like those of an ivy or a vine than of a maple, hence the common names ivy-leaved and vine-leaved maple. The species is native to the cool mountain forests of Japan, where these trees grow into an upright oval that broadens with age to a wide, rounded crown. Michael Dirr called the plant "extremely rare in cultivation but certainly worthy of consideration," and that judgment still holds.
Acer coriaceifolium is a very rare evergreen maple, and few people would recognize the plant as a maple at all: the leaves are leathery and entire, broadly oval to lanceolate, dark and glossy above, pale and felted beneath, with none of the lobing the genus is known for. Sometimes listed as Acer cinnamomifolium, this maple is native to the mountain forests of southern and central China, where the species grows as a small tree at middle elevations.
Acer fabri, known as Faber's maple or emerald jade maple, is a small evergreen to semi-evergreen tree of rounded habit whose slender, prominently veined, pointed leaves are entirely unlobed; few would guess the plant for a maple until the winged seeds appear. The new growth flushes a fine copper red, and the samaras ripen red as well before fading to brownish yellow in late summer, so the tree carries color without depending on the usual autumn display.
Few trees carry a collector's story as plainly as the paperbark maple. Ernest Henry Wilson gathered seed of Acer griseum in central China in 1901 for the Veitch nursery, and for most of the twentieth century nearly every paperbark grown in Western gardens traced back to that introduction and one that followed. The maple sets abundant winged samaras, yet most are empty, a parthenocarpic habit that leaves only a small fraction viable. That quirk is why the species has always been scarce, slow to propagate, and quietly treasured wherever a good specimen takes hold.
Among the snakebark maples, Acer micranthum ranks with the most delicate, a small, sometimes shrubby tree from the mountains of Honshu, Kyushu, and Shikoku, where the Japanese know the plant as the Komine maple. The species has no settled English name, and that quiet anonymity suits a tree grown for refinement rather than show. James Harris, in The Gardener's Guide to Growing Maples, calls this "a very elegant maple with attractive autumn tints," and Bluebell Nursery in Britain describes "a rare and sought after species ... a very striking garden plant with a lovely habit and an excellent choice for glorious autumn color," adding that established specimens carry eye-catching bark.
Acer oliverianum, the Oliver maple, carries the look of a Japanese maple on a tougher frame. Named for Daniel Oliver, the Victorian Kew botanist, this small Chinese and Taiwanese tree wears smooth jade green bark finely lined with white, and palmate, five-lobed leaves so like Acer palmatum that the two are easily confused. The difference shows in the constitution: the Oliver maple takes more heat and more drought than the Japanese maples, a welcome trait for warmer gardens that long for that filigree foliage.
Acer rubrum 'Candy Ice' is a Woodlanders introduction, found in southwest Virginia by the late Norman Beal. We use Norman's original name, though the same tree has been circulated elsewhere as 'Snowfire'. This is an unusual variegated red maple, the leaves marbled in pink, white, and green, and the foliage burns early, among the first to color when fall arrives.
Acer truncatum, the Shantung or Purpleblow maple, is a tough, tidy small tree from northern China and Korea, where the straight base of the leaf, truncate rather than heart-shaped, hands the species a botanical name. Glossy leaves emerge with a reddish purple flush in spring, mature to deep green, and close the year in shades of yellow, orange, red, and sometimes purple. Clusters of bright yellow flowers open with the new leaves in May, an uncommon sight among maples and one reason gardeners seek the tree out.
