Maple Leaves Forever’s Horticultural Consultant, Caitlin Ayling, has prepared a comprehensive guide to growing maple trees from seed. Follow this guide, starting with deciding on the type of tree, recognizing its’ seed, collecting, stratifying and sowing the seed to increase the chances your tree will survive and thrive. An excerpt is provided below, but you can read the whole article here on our website.
[Excerpt]
Which Species of Maple Do You Want to Grow?
The most important step in growing your own maple tree from seed is to determine which kind of maple tree you are trying to grow. This will help you determine what time of year the seeds will be ripe for collecting and how best to treat the seed prior to sowing. Ontario’s most commonly grown native maples fall into two categories; soft maples, which produce their seeds in spring/early summer and hard maples, which produce their seeds in the fall. Red Maple (Acer rubrum) and Silver Maple (Acer saccharinum) are soft maples, which you may have noticed are beginning to flower now. It is also important to note the naturally occurring cross of the Red and Silver Maple, known as the Freeman’s Maple (Acer x freemanii) falls into this category as well.The Sugar Maple (Acer saccharum) and the Black Maple (Acer nigrum) will flower later in the spring and their seeds won’t mature until the fall. As you may know, there are many cultivated varieties of the very popularly planted Norway Maple (Acer platanoides) in our urban landscapes. It is important to be certain of the identity of the species of tree you are collecting seed from and choosing to propagate. In some cases, Norway Maple can be quite prolific in their seed production and will drop an abundance of seed which germinates easily and can take over our natural areas. Make sure to familiarize yourself with our native maple identification features to be certain you are collecting the correct species seeds. See identification features and other interesting facts for our most common native maples here.