The Sugar Maple

by DONALD CULROSS PEATTIE

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THE most magnificent display of color in all the kingdom of plants is the fall foliage of the trees of North America. Even the acid Mrs. Trollope, who found nothing good to say of the domestic manners of the Americans, broke down her British reserve in praise of our autumns. The hallelujah shouted then by our forests springs from a complex of scientific causes, many of them unique to our country. Dry weather, for one, is essential, nor can Europe’s rainy autumns call out the reds like our Indian-summer sunshine. The acid granitic soils of New England especially bring forth display of glory, since nitrogen deficiency in the soil, as well as acid in the cell sap, is all but indispensable for it. Our dry uplands flame more brilliantly than the trees in low ground, since a reduced ground-water supply is a contribution to the color. Chief of all reasons for our autumn splendors is the fact that there is a greater variety of deciduous trees, shrubs, and vines in our country than in any other part of the temperate zone — to which, of course, fall as a biological season is confined.

Ruby and winy red glow the White Oaks. To the old gold of Beech are added the new-minted round coins of the Trembling Aspen. The Canoe Birch is a vision of white limbs in a shower of golden tresses. But over them all, over the clear light of the Lindens and Mountain Ash, over the leaping flames of Sumac and the hell-fire flickerings of poison ivy, over the war paint of the many Oaks, rise the colors of one tree—the Sugar Maple — in the shout of a great army. Clearest yellow, richest crimson, tumultuous scarlet, or brilliant orange — the yellow pigments shining through the overpainting of the red — the foliage of Sugar Maple at once outdoes and unifies the rest. It is like the mighty, marching melody that rides upon the crest of some symphonic weltering sea and, with its crying song, gives meaning to all the calculated dissonance of the orchestra.

There is no properly planted New England village without its Sugar Maples. They march up the hill to the old white meetinghouse and down from the high school, where the youngsters troop home laughing in the golden dusk. The falling glory lights upon the shoulders of the postman, swirls after the children on roller skates, drifts through the windows of a passing bus to drop like largesse in the laps of the passengers. On a street where great Maples arch, letting down their shining benediction, people seem to walk as if they had already gone to glory.

Outside the town, where the cold pure ponds gaze skyward and the white crooked brooks run whispering their sesquipedalian Indian names, the Maple leaves slant drifting down to the water; there they will sink like galleons with painted sails, or spin away and away on voyages of chance that end on some little reef of feldspar and hornblende and winking mica schist. Up in the hills the hunter and his russet setter stride unharmed through these falling tongues of Maple fire that flicker in the tingling air and leap against the elemental blue of the sky where the wind is tearing crow calls to tatters.

As a street tree, Sugar Maple is surpassed in form adapted to traffic only by the White Elm; and it is far less demanding of water, less injured by disturbance to its roots when pipes and drains are laid. But it suffers from city smoke and industrial gases; that is what keeps it a village tree, a tree of old Colonial towns. On the lawn it develops, from its egg shape in youth, a benignant length of the lower limbs which is ideal for the play of children. The line tracery of the tree in winter stands revealed in all its mingled strength and elegance. In spring the greenish yellow flowers appear at the same time that the leaves begin to open like a baby’s hand. The full spread of its foliage in summer gives what is perhaps the deepest, coolest shade granted by any of our Northorn trees. Not until fall do the “keys,”the winged fruits, mature. When they drop at last, they go spinning away, joined like Siamese twins, on their veiny, insect-like wings, with a gyroscope’s motion.

Under forest conditions, Sugar Maple may grow to a hundred and twenty feet, with a threeor fourfoot trunk clear of branches half the way — a cylinder of nearly knot-free wood almost unrivaled among our hardwoods. It is immensely strong and durable, especially the whitish sapwood called by the lumberman Hard Maple; a marble floor in a Philadelphia store wore out before a Hard Maple flooring laid there at the same time. Few are the standard commercial uses for lumber where Hard Maple does not figure, either at the top of the list or high on it. Tough and resistant, to shock, it becomes smoother, not rougher, with much usage — as you will notice if you look at an old-fashioned rolling pin.

And Sugar Maple can produce some notable fancy grains. There was a day that might be called the Bird’s-eye Maple Era. Some of us were young then, and may have believed it when we were told that the figure in the best bedroom set was made by woodpeckers. But woodpeckers work over a trunk in a straight line, and that is not how bird’seye is found in Maple. It is due, say the botanists, to the presence of hundreds of bark-bound buds; when the saw passes through these, on a tangential plane, the dainty effect is made on the cut surface. Familiar to all is the figure displayed by curly Maple, for it is the wood used for the backs of fine fiddles. Produced by dips in the fibers, it gives a striped effect that the violin makers insist upon procuring, rare though the figure is. In the age when an American made his own gunstocks, curly Maple was his favorite.

But even the featureless straight-grain wood has been in demand for furniture since the earliest cabinetmakers of New England plied their tools. Today it is more popular than ever, in designs good, bad, or indifferent. The cut of Sugar Maple is probably in the neighborhood of 480 million board feet a year. In Vermont, where the New England hurricane of 1938 downed an estimated million Maples, only the increasing farm abandonment keeps the young sugar bush growth ahead of the saw, in the state that is, above all others, famous for its maple sugar production. For the pressure for Maple at the sawmills has forced up the price of logs, of recent years, as high as thirty dollars a thousand feet.

When that happens, even Vermont, farmers stare hard at their grand old sugar trees, and begin to do a little figuring in their hard heads. Maple sugar extraction costs have been steadily rising. Why not sell the trees for their stumpage value — five or six dollars when the market is high? The lumber companies will even come in and cut the trees for you, and hand you cash. So the Iasi sweet sap oozes from the bleeding stump when spring comes vainly back.

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PLANT physiologists tell us that the very glory of the Maple’s autumnal leaves is due in part to the sweetness of this sap. The art of making sugar from it was the Indians’; Captain John Smith is merely the first of the many early writers who recorded it. The Reverend Samuel Hopkins, spiritual son of Jonathan Edwards, intellectual father of William Ellery Channing, wrote a careful description of the Indian methods and added his opinion that the sugar thus produced was “the most wholesome of any.”

The wise in these matters say that certain Maples yield more and better sugar, precisely as Apple trees give each its own special apples. The nature of the soil, the age of the trees, the particular season, the general climatic conditions, play their part. That grove is best, some say, which stands on a slope with a south exposure, in sandy soil; heavy soils and north exposures make a cloudier syrup with a coarser flavor.

The Vermont farmer of today may make his own maple sugar into cakes and sell if on the roadside or by mail order direct to the customer. But cakes of maple sugar, which require the highest grade, are not the only demand. In addition there is the syrup form of this confection, whose destiny it sometimes is to be blended with corn syrup or even (horribile dictu molasses. Sizable amounts of maple sugarhave been absorbed by the tobacco business, for flavoring the Virginian weed.

The wholesale market scatters barrels in January at the country stores of Vermont; the farmer picks them up, fills them, is paid (none too well, he says) in cash at the store, and the filled drums are then retrieved by the wholesaler. Mechanical efficiency as well as efficiency in marketing has sometimes been introduced into the sugar bushes, banishing handemptied buckets and ox teams drawing sledges over the snow, introducing aluminum-painted lead pipes that run from the tree downhill to the evaporator.

But how can I, an “outsider,” tell anything of the true flavor of sugar-making as your old-time Vermonter knows it? A Westerner, a mere botanist, a youngster of fifty, I have turned with gratitude to my old friend and neighbor here in California, Thomas Ripley, the best lumberman and Vale man (Class of 1888) I ever met, and author of the delectable volume A Vermont Boyhood. I present him to you with pride, and will let him, in words written here especially for this article, remember:—

“The spring snows begin to melt, leaving soft, wonderful-smelling bare patches about the Maple trunks in the sugar bush. The Vermont farmer cocks his eye at the sun in its northwest passage, feels something stirring in his insides, and turns his thought to the sugar shanty and the sap buckets. A nippy frost at night freezes little blobs of ice at the ends of the Maple twigs. A prodigal sun melts them and warms the bare patches. ‘Sap’s runnin’!’ The mysterious signal is sounded and the annual miracle is on. Every boy and girl in the village knows that sap’s runnin’. Teacher knows it, too. For in the kinship with the Maples, human sap as well as vegetable is rising.

“A wonderful transformation takes place in the sugar bush; with a stroke of heaven’s wand, the winter-bound grove becomes a fairyland of blue and gold, picked out with red and green sap buckets like Christmas tree ornaments. It was good to see and hear the drip of the sap. It seems to me that I can remember particular days when the sap ran in a trickling stream, so bounteous was the store. Sap drunk from the bucket was good but not half so good as that sucked through a straw from a hole bored in the root of the tree. No farmer would have permitted such vandalism in his bush, but we boys found a lone tree in the pasture and, with a bit and brace, bored into the very source of the stream a vertical hole which filled with sap as fast as we, lying on our bellies on the cold earth, could suck it out through straws. It would seem that any selfrespecting tree would have died on us in protest against such indecorous tapping, but so generous is the Vermont Maple that some trees there grow which are entering upon their second century of tapping.

“The methods of sugar-making have undergone such changes that the old-timer, going back to the sugar bush of his youth, would hardly recognize his former stamping ground. And even the old-timer, by turning the leaves of a book, may go still further and learn that the ’Indians tap and make gourds to receive the Liquor, which operation is done . . . when it best yields the Juice, of which, when the Indians have gotten enough, they carry it home and boil it to a just consistence of Sugar, which grains of itself, and serves for the same uses as other Sugar does.’ ¹

“With the advent of our pioneer ancestors, the American passion for efficiency set in, and the newcomers proceeded to show those redskins a thing or two. It seems there were various ways of ‘boiling down,’ each succeeding way an improvement on the old. In my boyhood, I read of the ‘good old times’ when two long logs were laid parallel to each other (‘side by each,’ as undoubtedly it was described), between which the fire was lighted. And over the fire a row of kettles— a big one at the end, to receive the sap, a smaller one next, and then a still smaller one, down to the littlest of all. Dipping from kettle to kettle, one went down the row, until the finished syrup was dipped from the little kettle. I can’t vouch for this fascinating scene, for I never saw it; nor did I, except vicariously, spend a night in the lean-to, facing the fire, snuggling under blankets and surely hearing bears and suchlike things.

“Boys in books had such adventures, but I was born too late. All boys are born too late. Today’s boys are born ’way too late. I wonder what boy of them knows the joy of running about to examine the buckets, taking a surreptitious swig with no thought of sanitary precautions, and struggling with his pony who loved the sap with an ungovernable thirst. He would break his halter strap to dash to the nearest filled bucket., and no persuasion of whip or halter could stop him till he had finished it off. And I am sure that no boy of this day of weaklings has the stomach which can receive and hold a quart of sticky maple syrup.

“The long fire and the row of kettles had given way to the march of improvement before ever I came on the scene. I seem to remember a big flat receptacle over a fire — an evaporator, I think it was called — into which the sap was poured. It bubbled and threw off the most delightful smells while the fire was stoked underneath with the dry ‘dead and down’ wood that the bush yielded. Though it was watched and skimmed from time to time, a lot of smoke and cinders floated into the boiling, and the finished product emerged a bit gritty, coarse in texture when compared with the modern stuff. Is it because my memory is filtered through the mists of time that I aver that our maple sugar was better than the refined product that has made Vermont famous today? No. I stand to my guns. It was better. If had the tang of wood smoke in it, and it gave the teeth something to bite on before it melted and slipped down the throat.

“As the boiling down proceeded, the boys and girls crowded in for ‘sugaring off’ parties. Big dishpans and earthenware bowls were packed hard with snow on which the hot syrup, fresh from the boiling, was spooned. It coagulated into the most heavenly chew. Patterns were made, preferably hearts and arrows with initials of boy swain or girl flutterer. But I am touching on things eternal and unchanging.

“New methods inevitably have been adopted in the making and marketing of Vermont maple sugar. As bit and brace took the place of the barbarous old axe slash, metal spouts replaced those made by hand from the Sumac, and then the old wooden buckets gave way to galvanized pails with, of all things, lids to them. I am glad that my pony lived his pony span of life and went to his pony heaven innocent of that iconoclastic innovation. I don’t suppose a boiling kettle could be found from Swanton to Brattleboro. The sugar shanty of yesterday has been transformed into a scientifically managed sugar factory, with instruments the very names of which would have caused headshakings in the bush of a generation ago. Thermometers! Hydrometers! Color standards! And I hear rumblings which presage even more dreadful things. The spirit of Henry Ford has invaded the bush with something which suggests the assembly line to supplant even the lidded galvanized iron pails. ‘Sap’s runnin’ ‘ — right from the tree to the sugar factory. Such is the penalty and the burden of Vermont’s leadership!”

So speaks a Vermonter, to whom the Maple’s colors are like the banner of his state, even of his country — for the heart of America, to each of us, is its most-loved corner. And one of our ways of loving this land is through its trees — Live Oak for the Southerner, the tall Conifers for the Westerner, and Maple for the man of Vermont. Indeed, we are not distinguished from the rest of humanity by this love of trees. Tree worship is as old as forest fear.

The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that trees were inhabited by supernatural beings, generally women, dryads. The old Latin names for trees, like Quercus the Oak and Fagus the Beech, Ulmus the Elm and Fraxinus the Ash, though they have masculine endings are all feminine nouns and modified by adjectives in the feminine declension. The White Oak is Quercus alba, not Quercus albus as one would expect. Is it thus we have kept the dryad in the trunk, since Virgil’s time? But in Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple, is imprisoned, surely, nothing so delicate as a dryad — rather a spirit of flame, fiercely leaping at a touch of frost, crying to the hills his battle call against the forces of winter and darkness and death.