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Acer glabrum
(Rocky
Mountain Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. Acer glabrum is common throughout the Four Corners states and the rest of the West. It typically grows to only 20 or 30 feet tall in dense clumps of many small trunks in moist woods. It has distinctive, handsome, serrated, and deeply cut leaves which often have red galls. (See photograph below.) Leaves turn yellows and reds in the fall. Linnaeus named this genus in 1753. "Acer" is the ancient Latin name for Maples. Edward Greene collected the first specimen of this species in Colorado in 1820 and John Torrey named it in 1827. "Glabrum" is from the Latin for "smooth". |
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Acer glabrum (Rocky
Mountain Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. Acer glabrum flowers open in loose terminal clusters about the same time the leaves develop. Flowers are unisexual but do have reduced stamens with functional pistils or reduced pistils with functional stamens. |
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Acer glabrum
(Rocky
Mountain Maple). Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. Leaves are commonly cut almost to the mid-rib into three sections. Occasionally the leaves are in three distinct sections.
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Acer glabrum
(Rocky
Mountain Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. The red swellings are quite common erineum galls, abnormal felty growth of hairs on the leaves, caused, in the case of Acer glabrum, by the Eriophid Mite, Eriophyes calaceris. |
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Acer grandidentatum (Big Tooth Maple, Canyon Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. As the map below indicates, Acer grandidentatum occurs very commonly in Utah, commonly in Arizona and southern New Mexico, and rarely in just two western counties of Colorado. In the Four Corners region, Acer grandidentatum is a rare find. Although floras indicate that Acer grandidentatum and Acer glabrum grow to about the same height (10 meters) and have leaves about the same dimensions ((3 to 8 cm wide), in the Four Corners region, A. glabrum is typically a shrubby mass of stems to 5 meters tall with leaves half the size of A. grandidentatum which grows (as shown in these photographs) to 12 meters tall. Acer grandidentatum commonly forms thickets with Quercus gambelii (the two dark trunks in the background at the upper right of the photograph). Acer grandidentatum is a close relative of Acer saccharum, the Sugar Maple and western pioneers used it as a source of maple syrup. Thomas Nuttall, acclaimed 19th century naturalist, taxonomist, and Harvard teacher collected the first specimen of this tree in Utah in the "Rocky Mountains, on Bear River of the Timpanogos" in 1834. He named and described it in 1838 in Torrey and Gray's Flora of North America. |
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Acer grandidentatum (Big Tooth Maple, Canyon Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. Leaves are palmately 3-5 lobed and these lobes are either entire or again lobed or toothed. The upper leaf surface is glabrous and the lower is moderately to very hairy. These hairs can be seen as a white glow around the leaf edges when viewed from the top, especially noticeable around the deep lobe in the upper left corner of the left photograph, magnified below.
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Acer grandidentatum (Big Tooth Maple, Canyon Maple) Foothills, montane. Woodlands. Spring. We were a bit late for the fall color of Acer grandidentatum, but the pale reds and yellows were still a good show. Even those leaves that had fallen and covered the ground (see below), made the hike worthwhile. |
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Range map © John Kartesz,
County Color Key
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Range map for Acer glabrum
Range map for Acer grandidentatum |
Species present in state and native
Species present in state and exotic
Species not present in state
Species present and not rare
Species present and rare
Species extirpated (historic)
Species extinct
Species noxious
Species exotic and present
Eradicated
Questionable presence
