How to Distinguish Hard Maple From Soft Maple Trees
- 1). Examine the leaves. The two hard maples, sugar maple (Acer saccharum) and black maple (Acer nigrum), have leaves with the areas between the lobes shaped like a "U." The most common soft maple, the red maple (Acer rubrum), has the area shaped like a "V." Another soft maple, the silver maple (Acer saccharinum), is "U"-shaped between the lobes, but it's more deeply cut between the lobes, unlike the sugar maple, whose leaf looks like the leaf on the Canadian flag. The box elder (Acer negundo), also a soft maple, is easy to distinguish by its leaves, since it has three to nine completely separate leaflets rather than a lobed leaf.
- 2). Look for the flowers in early spring. Hard maples and some soft maples have greenish-colored flowers, not easy to notice. Red maples have red flowers, so any maple with red flowers is a soft maple.
- 3). Watch when the seeds fall. All maples produce winged seeds, but only hard maples' seeds mature and fall in autumn. The seeds of two soft maples, the red and silver, ripen and fall in the spring. Box elder, another soft maple, holds onto its seeds all summer and over the winter.
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