Red Maple Acer rubrum
Red Maple is a perennial tree native to Canada and the lower 48 states. It grows to 68 ft and blooms Mar in full sun – part shade, with red fruit. A keystone plant for native insects and the food web.
More about this plant
Acer rubrum, the red maple, also known as swamp maple, water maple, or soft maple, is one of the most common and widespread deciduous trees of eastern and central North America. The U.S. Forest Service recognizes it as the most abundant native tree in eastern North America. The red maple ranges from southeastern Manitoba around the Lake of the Woods on the border with Ontario and Minnesota, east to Newfoundland, south to Florida, and southwest to East Texas. Many of its features, especially its leaves, are quite variable in form. At maturity, it often attains a height around 30 m (100 ft). Its flowers, petioles, twigs, and seeds are all red to varying degrees. Among these features, however, it is best known for its brilliant deep scarlet foliage in autumn. Wikipedia →
Growing & care
USDA PLANTS · TRY- Sun
- Full sun – part shade
- Soil & moisture
- High moisture
- Soil pH
- 4.7–7.3
- Fertility need
- Medium
- Adapts to
- Coarse (sandy), Medium (loam), Fine (clay)
- Hardiness
- USDA zone 3+
- Drought tolerance
- Low
- Shade tolerance
- Moderate
- Wet-soil tolerance
- Moderate waterlogging
- Height
- 68 ft
- Mature width
- ≈ 60 ft wide open-grown · ~35 ft in the wild
- Spacing
- 6–16 ft apart from USDA planting density
- Spread
- None — clumping
- Growth rate
- Rapid
- Growth form
- Single stem
- Lifespan
- Perennial · short-lived
- Foliage
- Deciduous broadleaf · medium texture
- Active growth
- Spring & summer
- Fruit
- Red
- Propagate by
- Seed, Bare root, Container
- Seed starting
- No stratification needed
- Seeds ripen
- Spring seed-collection / harvest window
- In the trade
- Routinely available
- Deer browsing
- Medium moderately palatable
- Resprouts if cut
- Yes regrows after top-kill
Sow timing keys off your local last- and first-frost dates.
Wildlife & pollinators
How pollinator value is scored →❧ Caterpillar hosts ~297 caterpillar species · keystone genus
Acer supports ~297 caterpillar species.
Native butterfly & moth caterpillars are the base of the terrestrial food web — most songbirds rear their young almost entirely on them. As a host for native Lepidoptera this is a powerhouse genus.
Recorded feeding on Acer in North America, including:
+ 8 more species → ↑ show fewer
✦ Bees 12 bee visitors
12 native & managed bee species are documented visiting Red Maple :
Wildlife & visitors 4 birds · 3 mammals · 20 nectaring
Open records of who else uses Red Maple — a generalist food-web signal, kept separate from the keystone Ecological Value.
Recorded eaten by 4 birds and 3 mammals species (fruit, seed, browse):
+ 1 more species → ↑ show fewer
20 adult butterfly & moth species are recorded nectaring at its flowers — the most-recorded:
Across 1,991 U.S. vegetation-survey plots that recorded Red Maple, these catalog species turned up most often in the same plot — a real field co-occurrence signal, not a planting prescription.
Related plants
More Acer →
How we know this (3) Methods & honest limits
We read each species’ measured specific leaf area (leaf area per unit dry weight) from the Global Spectrum dataset and band it: thin & fast (high SLA), medium, or thick & tough (low SLA). The global median is about 10 mm²/mg.
Honest limits: A species-mean from pooled measurements — individual plants vary with light and site. A broad strategy signal, not a precise per-plant figure.
A recorded categorical fact: each species is tagged C3 (standard), C4 (heat/water-efficient) or CAM (succulent, night-time CO₂ uptake) — or a facultative combination. We only show a trait card for the noteworthy C4/CAM cases; C3 is the unremarkable majority, kept in the data but not surfaced as a card.
We take the plant’s U.S. county range and look up each county’s long-term climate, then summarise: native rainfall = the median annual rainfall across its counties; heat tolerance = the warm end (90th percentile) of average temperature across its range (mirroring how our cold-hardiness floor uses an extreme). Counties + medians blunt the roadside/observer bias that makes point-level climate unreliable. Needs at least five placeable counties.
Honest limits: A realized, sampling-biased niche (where it has been recorded, not its physiological optimum), and county climate is coarse — large Western counties span deserts and mountains. Derived guide, never a measured fact.
Sources for this entry (42) Open & cited
Cite this page Open data, please attribute
PlantKey’s data is open under CC BY-SA 4.0 — free to reuse and adapt, with attribution and the same licence. Photos keep their own per-image licence + credit (see Sources above).
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