Acer platanoides L., Norway Maple

Account Summary

Growth form and preferred growing conditions

Cultivars of this familiar, variable, large-leaved, deciduous maple are commonly planted in larger gardens, estates, amenity landscaping and along roadside embankments. It tolerates a wide range of soils and planting situations and recommends itself to tree-planters of civil amenity and a private nature on account of its healthy, vigorous growth and two annual seasons of prominent beauty. It does, however, also seed itself rather freely irrespective of soil and site and can, therefore, spread and naturalise itself sometimes more widely than is welcome in rough grass, scrub and neglected ground near where it is planted (Mitchell 1996).

In terms of beauty, the tree blossoms in early spring (March-April), usually before mid-April, producing bright acid-yellow flowers, 8-10 mm in diameter, in 30-40 flowered, erect terminal corymbs that open before the leaves unfurl, and last until the leaves come out (Sell & Murrell 2009); in the autumn (mid-October) the leaves turn a bright butter-yellow, then turning orange-brown if they persist. In some trees, the outer leaves turn scarlet, making a real statement in the landscape (Mitchell 1996).

Species introduction

A widespread native of Europe from Norway to the Crimea, A. platanoides was introduced to Britain some time before 1683, when the first unambiguous written reference to it was made by George Sutherland in a list of trees that he moved from the botanic garden at Holyrood Palace to a new garden elsewhere in Edinburgh. Nowadays, there are no trees of known planting date much over 100 years old, although several much larger trees are known than the recorded specimens and will be considerably older. However, A. platanoides does not seem to be a very long-lived species and probably no individual tree dates back to before 1800 (Mitchell 1996). It has been known 'in the wild' in Britain since at least 1905 (T.D. Dines, in: Preston et al. 2002).

Variation

A great range of cultivars exist, varying for instance in tree habit, size, number of leaf lobes, leaf colour, surface texture, degree of dissection and leaf margin (eg entire to revolute or crisped). Griffiths (1994) lists no less than 33 named cultivars in the Royal Horticultural Society Index of Garden Plants.

Fermanagh occurrence

There are only four records of this tree present in the Fermanagh Flora Database, all made by RHN. Details of the other records are: Riversdale Forest, on the banks of the Ballinamallard River near Lower Lough Erne, July 2000; planted widely apart near the old castle ruin, Castle Caldwell, 11 November 2006; and Derrychara Playing Fields, planted between pitches and the lake, 16 May 2008. None of these stations could be assumed to contain naturalised specimens, but rather all the trees have been deliberately planted.

This is another example of a species almost entirely ignored in the Fermanagh survey carried out post-1975 by RHN and the current author (RSF), essentially because it is a planted introduction.

British and Irish occurrence

In Ireland, A. platanoides plantations occasionally produce seedlings, but self-sown trees rarely occur anywhere except in or near planted stock (Cat Alien Pl Ir). The New Atlas map contains Irish records of all date classes in a total of just 47 hectads widely scattered across the island. This contrasts with a total of 1,420 hectads with records in Britain, where A. platanoides is not only more commonly recorded, but is much more evenly distributed from Plymouth to Inverness.

European and world occurrence

Originally a European and W Asian species, A. platanoides is native from S Scandinavia to the Pyrenees and E France, and stretching eastwards to Switzerland, Italy and the Balkans and parts of Turkey as far as S Kazakhstan and the southern shores of the Caspian Sea. Further north, it is native from S Norway into Russia. Strangely, as a native, it is absent from much of W Europe, but is cultivated well beyond its native range, including in B & I, W France and E & C areas of North America, where it is a very common street tree in towns and cities (Elias 1980; Hultén & Fries 1986, Map 1291; Sell & Murrell 2009).

Names

Strangely, both the scientific and English common names of this tree are rather inappropriate and unhelpful. The broad native range of the species stretches across Europe from the Caucasus mountains westwards to the Spanish Pyrenees, but only minimally reaches the SW tip of Norway, yet the tree gets called 'Norway Maple'. Even more surprisingly, there does not appear to be any alternative English common name. Likewise, when in 1758 the Swedish botanist, Carl von Linné was looking for a name to give to this species, the leaf was until then the only one on a Maple that resembled the London Plane foliage. Linnaeus was unaware that the Scots were shortly afterwards to begin to refer to the Sycamore (A. pseudoplatanus) as the 'plane', and the North Americans were to call their Eastern Plane tree (Platanus occidentalis L.), American Sycamore (Elias 1980; Mitchell 1996).

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