Last Updated on February 1, 2021
This fine specimen at the edge of the woods is afforded plenty of sunshine, and displays a “perfect” 80% crown of leaves and a 20% trunk. Sugar maples are great shade trees and are really fall beauties with brilliant yellow, orange and scarlet leaves. These trees are actually a natural sugar factory. Photosynthesis is the biological process by which chlorophyll and sunlight work within the leaves to make sugar from water and carbon dioxide. This high-energy sugar feeds the tree while it grows during spring and summer. The sugar, is sent in late fall to the sapwood in the tree’s roots to be stored for the winter as starch. Just before it becomes spring, the starch turns to sugar as the wood thaws and it mixes with water from the roots, plus carbon dioxide gas in the tree, and begins the “sap run” up and around the trees’ branches to feed new buds. When the buds “leaf out” the entire process, starting with photosynthesis, begins again.
It is during the time between winter and spring, the “maple sugaring season,” that sugar makers use a tree’s “sap run” to remove some for syrup-making. It takes 40 gallons of sap to make 1 gallon of syrup. There is no harm done to the tree itself since only 10% of the sap produced is taken for processing. A taphole, a mere scratch on the bark, heals over in about two years.
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