Maple Family:-

Maple Family plant table with its Common Name - Botanical Name. Flowering Months Range. Habitat with link to that Loosestrife to Olive Wild Flower Families Gallery:-

Common Name

Botanical Name

Flowering Months

Habitat

Field Maple

Acer campestre

May-June

A deciduous tree, native in woodland, scrub and old hedgerows on a wide range of moist, usually base-rich, soils. It is also widespread as a planted tree in amenity areas, on farmland, along roads and in hedgerows and coppice. It fruits erratically, sometimes producing only male flowers following a year of prolific fruiting. 0-380 m (Llanthony, Brecon).

Male Flowers on left with 2 female flowers on right from Borough Green in Kent on 20 April

Male Flower from Eccles on 7 May

Female Flower Buds on 10 April

Fruit: Key

London Plane

Platanus x acerifolia

(Platanus hybrida)

April

A long-lived tree, extensively planted in streets and parks. Unlike its putative parents, it is extremely hardy in our area. It is vigorous even in polluted air and where root-space is restricted, and can be repeatedly pruned. It is fully fertile and seedlings are frequent in urban areas. Lowland. Once established it survives in dry soils. Commonly planted tree in cities as an urban roadside tree.

Flower

Bark in October

Form from The Vines

Form from The Vines in Rochester in Kent in October

Norway Maple

Acer platanoides

April-May

A deciduous tree planted in woodland, hedgerows, amenity areas, gardens and along roads. It tolerates a wide range of soil types and is frequently self-sown, becoming naturalised in secondary woodland, rough grassland, scrub and urban waste land. Generally lowland, but reaching 340 m at Alston (Cumberland).

Flower from Borough Green on 20 April

Flowers from Queendown Warren in Kent on 10 April

Flower Bud from Queendown Warren on 10 April

Form

Sycamore

Acer pseudoplatanus

May-June

A large, rapidly growing deciduous tree of plantations, woods, parkland, estates, large gardens and roadsides, prolifically self-sowing and naturalised in a very wide range of natural, semi-natural and man-made habitats, avoiding only the most acidic and waterlogged soils. In upland areas, however, it is often restricted to sites associated with habitation. 0-580 m (Dowgang Hush, Cumberland).

Flower

Flowers from Borough Green in May

Foliage of Seedling in August

Form in September

Flower

Juvenile foliage

Back of leaf from Borough Green in May

Trunk in September

From the Ode to the London Plane Tree by Heather Greaves:-

"They are also very important to the city of New York (and not just because the leaf is the Parks Department logo). The London plane, usually considered Platanus x acerifolia but also known by other Latin epithets, is not really native, although it very closely resembles the native American sycamore, Platanus occidentalis. Actually, it is probably a cross between this American species and Platanus orientalis, a Eurasian relative. In any case, it has been widely planted as a city tree for decades, which turns out to be a good idea. In its assessment of the New York City urban forest, the US Forest Service Northern Research Station determined that the London plane is the most important city tree we have.

They base this conclusion on several factors. For one thing, London planes have a very high leaf area per tree; that is, the London plane gives us a lot more pretty, shady, air-filtering, evaporatively-cooling leaves per single trunk than most other species in the city. In fact, according to the Forest Service, London planes make up just 4% of the city tree population, but represent 14% of the city's total leaf area. (Compare this with the virulently invasive tree of heaven [Ailanthus altissima], which constitutes 9% of the tree population but only about 4% of the total leaf area.)

Also, because they tend to become very tall and have large canopies, London planes are our best trees for carbon storage and sequestration. They are holding on to about 185,000 tons of carbon (14% of the total urban tree carbon pool), and each year they sequester another 5,500 or so tons (about 13% of all the carbon sequestered by city trees each year). That makes them both gorgeous and highly beneficial: all in all, good trees to have around."