Red Maple Flowers

It’s that time of year when many people are anticipating the first flowers of spring, without realizing that some are already here! We’ve looked at two of my favorite precocious plants – Willow and Beaked Hazelnut – but I also have a soft spot for Red Maple (Acer rubrum), flowering now.

When we think of flowering trees, it’s often Apples, Cherries, and Serviceberries that come to mind. These showy species follow the usual order of things: leaf out first, then flower. But Red Maple is among a handful of trees and shrubs that does things backwards, producing tiny but beautiful flowers weeks before leaves appear. The botanical term for this is ‘hysteranthous’ and, like everything in nature, it comes with advantages and disadvantages.

On the plus side, Red Maple gets its flowers out before the competition, offering pollen and nectar to hungry bees and other insects while pickings are still comparatively slim, thus increasing chances of pollination. Red Maple is pollinated by both insects and wind, and so not having leaves to hide flowers from pollinators or shelter blossoms from breezes is beneficial.

Of course, there’s no such thing as a free lunch and hysteranthy comes with risks. The biggest one in this part of the world is frost: if you’re going to flower in late April on PEI, there’s a chance that some or all of your blossoms will be killed by cold. That’s not fatal to the tree but does mean it will produce fewer (or no) seeds that year. Reproduction is the main goal of every plant, and a failed seed year is not ideal.

Red Maple trees are usually all-male or all-female, but some have a mixture of both types of flowers, and individual trees can change genders as the need arises (for example, to temporarily produce more females – and thus more seeds – during periods of environmental stress). The flowers shown here are male; those spiky-looking things are stamens, each with a pollen-filled anther at the tip.

I love this time of year, when our hardwood forests start to blush red with maple flowers: an unmistakable part of PEI Untamed!