Acer grandidentatum, commonly called bigtooth maple or western sugar maple, is a species of maple native to interior western North America. It occurs in scattered populations from western Montana to central Texas in the United States and south to Coahuila in northern Mexico.
Description
It is a small to medium-sized deciduous tree growing to tall and a trunk of diameter. The bark is dark brown to gray, with narrow fissures and flat ridges creating plate-like scales; it is thin and easily damaged. The leaves are opposite, simple, long and broad, with three to five deep, bluntly-pointed lobes, three of the lobes large and two small ones (not always present) at the leaf base; the three major lobes each have 3–5 small subsidiary lobules. The leaves turn golden yellow to red in autumn (less reliably in warmer areas). In Texas, specimens do not color well if they have a heavy seed year.
The flowers appear with the leaves in mid spring; they are produced in corymbs of 5–15 together, each flower yellow-green, about diameter, with no petals. The fruit is a paired samara (two winged seeds joined at the base), green to reddish-pink in color, maturing brown in early fall; each seed is globose, diameter, with a single wing long.
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File:2016.04.08 13.26.35 DSC03215 - Flickr - andrey zharkikh.jpg|Flowers and emerging spring leaves in early April in Salt Lake County, Utah
File:Bigtooth Maple Leaves.jpg|Mature summer leaves in August
File:Red leaves (Acer grandidentatum) - Little Cottonwood Canyon, Utah (2003).jpg|Fall leaf color in late September
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Taxonomy
It is closely related to Acer saccharum (sugar maple), and is treated as a subspecies of it by some botanists, as Acer saccharum subsp. grandidentatum (Nutt.) Desmarais.
Distribution and habitat
It grows from the Rocky Mountains in southeast Idaho, through Utah
See also
- Lost Maples State Natural Area