This family of trees are highly ornamental, and their cultivation in the park, lawn, and road-side should be much extended. Whether we regard the beauty of their flowers and opening in early spring, or the red fruits in the beginning of summer, or their red and orange-colored foliage infutumn, they deserve to be highly considered, as they are, one of the most ornamental of hardy trees.

The Bed Maple

The Bed Maple, called also the White Maple, the Swamp Maple, and the Scarlet Maple, is a tree of middling size, growing abundantly in swampy low grounds, in most parts of the Middle States. "Its flowers, which appear in April or May, before the leaves, are of a bright crimson, or scarlet, and make a striking appearance in whorls or pairs, of sessile, crowned bunches, on the scarlet or purple branches. The flowers are of two or three kinds, found on different trees. The surface of the leaves is liable to be variegated with lines of scarlet, or crimson, or orange, at every season of the year. This occasionally happens to all the leaves on a tree, even in middle of summer, forming a gorgeous contrast with the green of the rest of the forest The leaves begin to change their color in August, and are usually gone by the first of November".

The observation of a single year of the varying* colors of the Red Maples, would be sufficient to disprove the common theory, that the colore of the leaves in autumn are dependent on the frosts. It is not an uncommon thing to see a single tree in a forest of maples turning to a crimson or scarlet in June or August, while all other trees remain green. It is not uncommon to see a simple brilliantly colored branch showing itself on a verdant tree; or a few scarlet leaves exhibit the tints in October, while all the rest of the tree and wood has the soft greens of June.

A Red Maple

A Red Maple is usually a low, round-headed tree, of less beauty of shape than either of the other species. But the great variety of rich hues which it assumes, earlier in the fall than any other tree, gives it a conspicuous place in our many-colored autumnal landscape.

The Red Maple bears transplanting remarkably well, is of rapid growth, young trees increasing in diameter from a fourth to two-thirds of an inch in a single year. It may be made to grow in any soil not too dry; still it flourishes best and attains its largest size in rich swampy land.