I write this looking across a July hayfield at the old hedgerows.  We had a good winter, after a year of drought, but last year’s damage is apparent.  Many of the maples are already the olive green of late summer and many show crown die-back. 

The sugar maples planted two centuries ago are dying, by the thousand.  As New England as the stone walls they line, these giants were planted along the roads and walls as multi-purpose trees.  They produced shade, but they also produced maple syrup.  Planting them along the road made accessing the buckets very easy and in southern New England where every inch of land was cleared for agricultural use, devoting an entire hillside to a sugar bush made no economic sense.  The space by the walls and roads, however, was there for the taking.   But unlike the northern sugar bushes these lines were not interplanted with young trees on a fifty year cycle.  Maple syrup was never a major commercial product, and the roadside trees produced more than enough for local consumption. 

Thousands of sugar maples were planted between 1760-1830. These even aged (in general a line was planted all of a piece) stands are stressed by the combination of development, pollution, road paving and widening, and the stress of not being in a forest situation (paradoxically the forest competition means the sugar maple, a forest tree par excellence, is generally better balanced root to crown and so more tolerant of extreme weather fluctuations such as drought when it is in the woods.  Many of the hedgerow maples are quite literally to big for their own good).

We will see the death of these giants, but we could give new giants to our children’s children.  Plant a sugar maple. (if in northeast N. America that is!)