Silver maple (Acer saccharinum) is pure gold! If you like fast-growing, hardy trees that are excellent for our floodplain ecosystems, anyway. This beautiful tree is highly adaptable to urban and bottomland soils and its large, spreading crown and aforementioned fast growth makes it a great shade tree. It is short-lived for a tree (typically maxing out at 125 years or so) and not very sought after for its wood, but is a great wildlife tree.
Want more goods from the woods? Subscribe to this channel, and our monthly Forests for the Bay newsletter at www.allianceforthebay.org/project/forests-for-the-bay/newsletters/ ! Who are we, anyway? Forests for the Bay is an educational program of the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay, a nonprofit organization dedicated to improving the health of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. Learn more at allianceforthebay.org.
Forests for the Bay has been funded by the US Forest Service for many years, and has allowed us to educate countless people on trees and their myriad benefits. Tree Talk is an extemporaneous lesson by Ryan Davis, recorded opportunistically by his wife Allyson while out and about in the landscapes they love. He sometimes gets things wrong because he's just speaking from memory, and the pop-ups and fact checks come from two sources: the US Forest Service Southern Research Station's accounts of the species at hand, and the 5th edition of North American Trees by Dr. Richard Preston Jr. and Dr. Richard Braham (Ryan's college dendrology professor) of North Carolina State University. This particular video, and a few others, also had some tidbits from Donald Culross Peatie's superb book, "A Natural History of North American Trees".
Recorded on 03/09/25 in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, by not-so-fast growing Allyson Davis.
No werewolves were harmed in the making of this Tree Talk.